


We're in a Room Without a Door

by fayolin



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Shadowrun
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shadowrun Fusion, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Cyberpunk, Elves, Heist, M/M, Magic, Memory Alteration, Mental Coercion, Mystery, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Snark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:34:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 59,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24464284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fayolin/pseuds/fayolin
Summary: You'd think no one would be foolish enough to plan a heist on Sarif Industries, especially considering their recently reinstated (and well documented) head of security, Adam Jensen. But when group of Shadowrunners hit a Sarif Industry warehouse, it uncovers something much more ballsy than a simple heist: the end of the world.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (walks into the fandom years late with a crossover, OCs, and a smoothie) ...sup.
> 
> You know how sometimes you just loved playing cyberpunk games, and then the world begins rapidly descending into a cyberpunk dystopia as you were revisiting characters from roleplaying games you played in college? Just me?
> 
> Here are the ground rules. This story begins in the middle of DX:HR, and for sake of plot the story takes longer than 12 god damn hours. Also, magic exists and other Shadowrun specific non-human wackiness shows up. Canon is the bones on which I build my house.
> 
> If you are looking for Shadowrun rules accuracy, let me just start bribing you with other things now: we played with a heavily modified rules set, it was a lot more fun, and the side effect of being a grown up occultist is that your silly hermetic mage from college gets cooler magic. I don't write the rules, I just write the much more fun to read fic.
> 
> Finally, tags and ratings will update as the story continues. Each chapter will call out specific things if they come up. So much of this is already written, I'm just working on linking things together and editing. Oh god, the editing.

Nestled between a lake and a river, Detroit had many interesting places to visit: a prestigious university, many centers of art and architecture, and lovely parks in which to take in some of the local color.

None of those places were anywhere near the warehouses by the docks just before midnight.

Adam Jensen hopped the barbed wire fence, scanning the grassy lawn for any sign of entry. There wasn’t anything obvious, but it wasn’t like warehouses in this part of town were known for their great security or their architectural brilliance. However, it did seem odd there was a single window open near the upper north west corner of the building, when all the others were closed and sealed. If you weren’t looking for something like it, it would be hard to see, but once noticed, it was impossible to miss.

Just like everything else about this mystery.

A month ago, if you had asked Jensen if he would be trekking out to a fishy worf just before midnight on a Saturday night because of a hunch of one Francis Pritchard, first rate cybersecurity system analyst and world class know-it-all, Jensen would have asked what bridge you had to sell him. But here he was, miles away from the Sarif headquarters and not on any kind of official business.

Sighing, he opened up his info link and connected back to someone he hoped could give him a little more information.

“Ok, I’m at the warehouse on Altuna, Pritchard,” said Jensen, looking around to see if there were any signs of patrols or cameras and coming up short. “I found building 1045, and it looks like it’s called Globeworks Warehouse Storage Solutions and Shipping? Are there any reports of an alarm, or any blueprints you can send me?”

“I’m not exactly sure how the security of a run down piece of shit building suddenly became my problem,” muttered the hacker, obviously reading through screens of text, and typing furiously. “Don’t you have some fancy tricks in those eyes to scan the area and get that information yourself?”

“I’m pretty sure it became your problem when you discovered the records in our system in the first place,” said Jensen. It looked like there was a good route up the fire escape if nothing else. He closed on the building, still keeping his eyes and ears on high alert. Things were almost too uniformly quiet. “Dr. Wilson hadn’t even noticed the shipping address had changed on her confirmation until you brought it up. Also, you specifically told me not to scan any systems until you gave me the all clear on this one, because something didn’t ‘feel right’ to you. So what gives?”

“Are you sure the building is 1045?” said Pritchard, his tone angrily caustic but getting a little frantic. “And Globeworks? That doesn’t even sound like a company.”

A month ago, these kinds of verbal sparring matches would have had some real sting to them, a sign of something festering underneath the surface. But in the days that had stretched into weeks of Jensen’s new life at Sarif Industries, the two men had broken through their resentment and anger, past curt respect, all the way through to something like a real friendship, albeit one that thrived on being argumentative little shits.

With some of the more sinister world conspiracies he had been finding recently, Jensen occasionally wished they were closer, when he didn’t want to strangle him. It would be nice to feel like anyone was on his side, and not just using him for their own ends. So when Pritchard had come to him with this frankly bizarre turn of events, he was more than willing to follow it wherever it led.

Even if that was a foul smelling warehouse by the docks at midnight in the cold.

“Absolutely sure, Francis,” said Jensen, his gravelly voice sounding like it could turn glass into sand. He stopped, looked both behind and above him in a slow careful scan before saying anything else. “Are you telling me you can’t find anything?”

“I’m saying there’s something majorly strange going on there. I conspicuously cannot find anything about that block.” Pritchard cleared his throat nervously. There was some anger, but it was not directed at Jensen, it was directed at whatever he was seeing on the screen. “Seriously, it’s like a hole opened up in the ‘net and swallowed all the information. I think it’s possible you’re dealing with a pretty experienced hacker right now. Maybe a whole crew of people in there, with unknown and unknowable capabilities.”

“You sound worried.” Jensen grabbed the fire escape and leaped up, getting to the roof and landing as softly as a feather. “Can you give me any predictions on what I should be looking for?”

“I can’t even bring up a trace of the map of the block you are located on, now you expect me to become an oracle?” said Pritchard. “If I can’t even _find_ the cameras to hack into them, they’re behind something pretty serious. Watch yourself, Jensen. Don’t connect to any networks, don’t plug into anything you can’t be completely sure is safe. Maybe put gloves on before you go inside.”

“Understood,” said Jensen. “I’m going dark, keep broadcasts down. I’ll report in as soon as I can.”

“Good plan. Stay safe.”

On that ominous note, the audio connection went dead. Jensen didn’t go to the obvious open window, but he did go to one nearby. Leaning off the roof, he peeked in the top of the window pane, scanning the room to see if he could spot any interlopers. 

Honestly, it was the intruder’s worst luck that he picked that specific window to look in. If he had picked even the next pane over, he might not have caught the glint of the moonlight off the hacker’s head-rig, as they hunched in the corner.

Easing the window open and slipping in, Jensen landed on a rafter deceptively lightly while keeping his eyes open for trouble. He looked over the rest of the room to see if there were any other obvious targets. On the ground, two people were inside a container, putting the lid back on a large wooden crate. However, both of them were very focused on their work. One other person was by the door, holding a small box, exiting out an office door. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in sight, so it made sense that it would be best to take out the obvious hacker first. If nothing else, it would cripple their defenses.

With a whisper, he moved to a slightly larger platform, and pulled out his stun rifle. He settled into a sniping position and looked down the sights, aiming a tranq dart at the small form tucked in the corner of the warehouse air vent, heavily shadowed and hunched over a dim glow. 

He steadied his breathing, and with a sigh, he pulled the trigger and watched the small figure crumple. He felt a little tinge of regret at how small the figure was. It was almost like a kid was over there, lying unconscious in the dark.

What he didn't expect was the flash of pain as his face was smashed into the ground. A wicked looking knife pierced through his left hand and someone kicked his rifle away.

“We’re made!” yelled a male voice, furious and right next to his ear, kicking backwards, leaving the blade “It’s the robo-cop, someone get eyes on our techie and get out of here.”

Jensen pushed himself up, grabbing the knife and tossing it aside. He braced himself for more blows that didn’t come, and came face to face with a black-clad ninja, long blade drawn and crouched on the defensive. Only his eyes, pale against the grey and black of his face were visible. As Jensen stood, he flexed his hand, feeling the parts of it inside start to knit back together. 

“What are you doing here,” growled Jensen, palming one of the tranq darts that had knocked out of the rifle in his uninjured hand as he moved closer to the threatening form. 

“I’m sure you’d like you know, corporate scum,” said the ninja, circling slightly, trying hard not to get backed into the wall. He then mumbled something too quiet for Jensen to pick up.

“Couldn’t catch that,” said Jensen, closing some distance. The ninja jumped and hit his back against the wall, eyes widening in surprise, steadying his blade. “I don’t suppose you would repeat that?”

“Heh,” said the ninja, as he felt the wall, looking like he was trying to merge into it. “This might be a little above your pay grade. I don’t suppose I could convince you to forget we were here?”

“You did just stab me,” said Jensen, shaking his hand, but not stepping closer. As he stood still, his CASIE whirled into activity, giving him additional insight. The ninja was waiting for something that Jensen could not see, but also was moving his hands almost imperceptibly, readying something unseen.

“I stabbed your clearly robot hand after you shot my friend filled with tranqs,” said the other man, his eyes shifting to a far window as if he was listening to something inaudible. “I’m sure if we keep talking for a couple of minutes your very special Sentinel system will make it all better.”

“Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt,” said Jensen, slightly surprised to hear someone parrot his augmentations back to him. Was this someone from inside Sarif? Was this someone he knew? His hand tightened on the tranq ammo, as he braced to lunge. 

“Fuck.” muttered the ninja, rolling his eyes as he braced his feet, his hands starting to glow, looking straight at Jensen. “Delta, I need an update!”

Jensen rushed forward, running the other man up against the wall, knocking the blade to the ground, pushing him against the concrete, using his injured hand to pin the other man’s chin into the unforgiving stone. With a quick yank, he tore the black hood off, bringing the other man’s eyes and hair into the dim light. In an instant, he was he glimpsed the still masked face of a grey haired, dark skinned elf, glaring murder down at him.

“I think I was asking you a question.” Jensen leaned in slightly, seeing the dark eyes of the other man narrow down to a slit. One of the ninja’s hands came up and touched his wrist. 

“Go to hell,” he said. His dark eyes turned bright white and he let a surge of light flow into Jensen. Weakness seeping into all Jensen’s augmented limbs. He stumbled backwards, his grip loosening on the ninja’s neck. 

“Go for clear, I’m lighting up,” said the ninja, as he slipped down, kicking up and over the stumbling augmented soldier. With a flip, he cleared Jensen’s head and reversed the choke hold, slapping something on Jensen’s chest before bringing his hand up for leverage. 

Squeezing down on Jensen’s neck, the ninja hissed into Jensen’s ear: “If you are thinking about following us, I swear to whatever god you believe in, I’ll come after everyone you’ve ever cared about.” 

Jensen felt more than saw the EMP blast hit, surging from the patch on his chest, powering down his augs, as he slumped in the other man’s grip, his vision darkening. 

The ninja carefully set him down, and he heard a voice close to his ear as his face lay flat on the cold iron floor.

“Stay down,” he said. “It will be better for you in the long run if you don’t get caught up in this.”

And then, nothing.

Jensen lay there, wave after wave of EMP pulsing through him, his vision fading in and out. To say he was overwhelmed would be an understatement, his HUD flashing and his breath shuttering with each surge. Who were those people? What were they looking for?

The surges were getting less intense, but it still was exceedingly uncomfortable to sit and twitch on the platform. As he waited for everything to reboot, he felt the platform he was on depress, spiking his adrenaline. A familiar black-clad hand came up right in front of his nose and his mouth and hovered there. Surprisingly, it waited, feeling his breath come in and out, waiting through two EMP surges as more of his systems came back online. 

“I’m fine,” came the voice of the ninja, sounding annoyed and maybe slightly embarrassed. As Jensen’s eyes rebooted, he saw the other man on the window ledge as he jumped away. “I just had to grab something. The robot-cop is still down and isn’t coming after us, but I’ll take the long way back.”

The ninja glared down at him, something unreadable on his face, then disappeared into the night, leaving through the same window that Jensen had used.

It was another five minutes of cycles before Jensen could reach up and tear the patch off. As his systems started to bring themselves back online fully, he thought about what had just happened. 

He had gotten flipped like a jewelry store by an unknown number of sophisticated robbers who collected something from an unknown crate. His HUD scrolled through various reboot messages, as he pushed himself up, shaking his head. Finally his info link came back online, and he opened a channel.

“Pritchard?”

“Jensen!” The voice on the other side of the line was obviously worried. “You went completely offline there for a minute!”

“Yeah, I ran into something vicious. They got away, unfortunately,” he brought up his internal system to make sure his Icarus system was online before he jumped down to the main floor. Walking over to the wooden crate that the runners had been looking at, he scanned it with his retinal cameras, making a 3-d scan for later. “They were getting something out of this crate. I’m opening it up now.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” asked Pritchard. “Maybe they left a trap.”

“They didn’t have time,” said Jensen, ripping off the top, but leaning back somewhat. When nothing happened he reached over the side and pulled out the shipping manifest, and flipped through it, searching for what could have been so important. What he read just made the whole evening more and more confusing.

The whole crate was filled with old writings. Like, really old. Ancient Sumerian old. Some pictograms, even. Tablets, scrolls, books, all packed away in smaller, individually labeled boxes that showed places of origin. Many of these looked like they were on loan from a personal collection, or recently purchased in cooperation with a local museum with a local museum. All going to the lab of one Dr. Wilson in Sarif’s research wing.

It was also filled with straw and dust, but it was clear that one was missing. Well, not very clear. And it certainly wasn’t going to be clear once the crate moved again. It was like whoever took the one item had shifted everything enough so one box wouldn’t be missed.

Going on a hunch, he held the paper up to his face and smelled it. It, strangely enough, did not smell like sawdust and wood, but more like it had been freshly printed and slid into the folder just moments ago.

Curious.

“Jensen, I’m dying here,” said Pritchard, snapping him out of his thoughts. “What’s in the box?”

“It’s…ancient clay tablets?”

“…are you serious?”

“Nothing about this makes sense,” said Jensen, looking around the warehouse, seeing if there was any sign of the intruders. Given the evidence, it seemed unlikely, but maybe his luck had changed. “Why would ninjas be after clay tablets? And why would Dr. Wilson need them?”

“Wait, where were there ninjas?” said Pritchard. “Why didn’t you lead with ninjas?”

“I told you things got vicious.” Jensen put the lid back on the crate. “I’m going to make a sweep of the place and see if they left anything behind. I’m sending you scans of the manifest and whatever I could pull off this shipping label.“

“Slap a transmitter on a camera before you head back,” said Pritchard. “We can figure things out when you aren’t being jumped by mystery hackers and unknown armies. Pritchard out.”

Jensen sighed and looked around the building once more before starting his sweep. He had a feeling this night was only beginning to get weird.


	2. Squint Your Eyes a Little Closer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jensen goes looking in Sarif's labs for more clues, and only comes up with more questions. Something weird is happening in the basement of Sarif Industries...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm glad people are liking the story! It will keep coming because let's be real, this is more self indulgent than anything, but you know, it's nice other people are liking the show!
> 
> (Note: I changed the title of the chapter after I uploaded chapter 5, as I finally settled on a THEME, it used to “Holding On And Holding In” but the rest of the very indulgent lyrics are by the same artist and it bugged me. It’s online, I can update it :p)

Jensen got back to Sarif headquarters, walking into Pritchard’s office without saying a word, a data pad in his hand and a puzzled expression on his face. The hacker was furiously typing into his computer, and didn’t look up when he walked in. Jensen waited a few moments to see if anything changed, before sighing and starting to speak.

“I grabbed my file on Dr. Wilson on my way up here,” said Jensen, unsuccessfully hiding a smirk as Pritchard started and looked up, eyes narrowing in clear annoyance. “She’s a pharmacologist with a double major in biology and botany. She came well recommended, no criminal record, nothing weird showing up in any background checks. Her current research is part outreach, part drug trial: she’s collaborating with a local museum to look at some ancient medical practices and see how they work in a clinical environment.”

“Fascinating,” said Pritchard, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “So, who is going to get cow dung spread on them?”

“Ignoring that,” said Jensen, moving over to the couch and sitting, scrolling up the tablet. “But what isn’t clear is why anyone would steal things from the museum pieces while leaving no evidence. Or go to such great lengths to make it seem like nothing was missing.”

“I don’t suppose you were able to find anything else at the warehouse?” said Pritchard. “A name tag, or a glowing arrow, or some fingerprints? Maybe a shoe or something?”

“What do you think evidence is?” said Jensen, looking up from the tablet. Before Pritchard could tell him _exactly_ how helpful he thought Jensen was being, Jensen gave him the play-by-play of the run-in at the warehouse, from open windows to flipping ninjas. 

He did leave out the ninja doubling back to make sure he was breathing. He couldn’t quite figure out what to make of that yet.

“Jesus, Jensen. It sounds like your ninja was a mage,” said Pritchard, shaking his head. “They are nasty pieces of work. That he zapped you and then EMPed you seems like they were trying to make sure you stayed down until they were done.”

“Probably. Never seen anything like it before.”

“They’ve got a lot more magic users on the west coast, and a ton up in the Seattle area. More metahumans, too, come to think of it,” said Pritchard, looking into the middle distance, grimacing as if remembering something distasteful. “I mean, we have some metahumans. But I think people are busy enough hating on augs they are equally venomous to anything else that looks out of the ordinary, so most of them find other places to live. I was hearing on the net that there’s something about Detroit that is real hostile for 'the Awakened' or whatever they call themselves. The ones that stay are mostly just academics and posers.”

“This guy certainly knew what he was doing,” said Jensen, rubbing his wrist. “And he was definitely hostile. But other than white hair and dark grey forehead and pointy ears, I’ve got nothing. “

“How about the other people there?”

“Yes, two small shapes moving in the darkness, rummaging in a box, and another walking away. Very distinctive,” said Jensen. “Oh, and a small person-shaped blob covered in denim, with a knitted cap pulled way down over their head. I’m sure that fits a profile of only a thousand people.”

“I’ll alert the media,” said Pritchard, looking back down at his computer and frowning.

“All they left was the tranq round where the hacker dropped, but I think that’s because they thought it might be trackable. It was wiped down with something strong, to clear off any blood, and the door handles and window sills were dust free.” Jensen’s mouth flattened in tense frustration, and he tried to remember if there was anything he could have forgotten. “I can tell you which entrances they used, but only because they were slightly less dirty than the rest of the place, and I only knew that because I was looking for it. This was a very professional job.”

“Well, I managed to pull a little information off the cameras after you got the link going, so we might have something to go on,” said Pritchard, looking more smug by the moment. “I thought it was nothing, but given how clean the warehouse was, I’m now sure I’m right and this just got caught in an automated clean up system. Almost everything was wiped, but there is something in the secured trash from the system crash when you knocked out the hacker. It looks like they managed to clear off everything except this, and I’m betting if we went back for this tomorrow, it wouldn’t be there. It’s not a lot, but it is distinctive, and it gives me a starting place on who those people were.”

“And?”

“And as I said, starting place!” Pritchard looked back down and kept typing, scowling at his screen. “I’ll have you know trying to find information on a very skilled hacker based on one shipping switch and one half-deleted signature is like finding a needle in a warehouse filled with haystacks. But I’m calling in some favors from some old…acquaintances to see what kind of information I can get.”

“Hmm,” said Jensen, looking down at the tablet. “I’m sure those acquaintances are very legitimate.”

“You can have above board, or you can have results,” said Pritchard, not rising to the bait. He frowned at something on the screen and kept talking, obviously distracted by whatever came up. “However, in this case, we may not get either. Small covert strike forces try and leave as little of an impact as possible. Especially if they aren’t on their home turf.”

“You sound like you are speaking from experience,” said Jensen.

“You sound like you are trying to grill me for information. It’s not a good look.”

Jensen held his hands up in mock surrender as he stood up, looking at the time. It was almost one a.m. He really needed some sleep. But it looked like it was going to be a long night for both of them.

“I think our next step is to talk to Dr. Wilson, but she shouldn’t be in until Monday,” said Jensen, standing up and stretching, trying to fake some wakefulness into himself. “She would have a better idea as to what was in the box, and what might be missing. I could check her lab and see if I can find anything, but I’d pretty much be going in blind, and that seems ill-advised.”

“Maybe you want to keep the theft close to your chest,” said Pritchard in an obviously dismissive fashion, pouring his focus back into his screens. “When someone spends this much time covering their tracks, there’s a good reason for it. A little bit of recon on the doc might be our best bet. I can make sure the cameras stay looped so you should be able to get in and out without much trouble.”

“I’ll have to talk with her eventually, though. I need to at least tell her that I found her shipment,” said Jensen, mostly to himself. “Her email inquiring at its location started this whole thing. How did they manage intercept it, by the way?”

“Working on it!” snapped Pritchard, waving his hand over the monitor. “Don’t you have a vent to go crawl in?”

Jensen snorted as he left, tucking his tablet into his coat pocket, walking down to the pharmacological labs. Time to see what research Dr. Wilson was up to.

___

Pritchard’s smart comments aside, Jensen did take a couple of vents to reach the lab. On one hand, he could have just walked in, hacked the lock and ruffled through papers. But if there was something funny going on, he wanted to be sure he had all his exits covered.

And that involved obtaining a good vantage point before he began.

The lab was dark, which was to be expected at 2:14 am on a Saturday morning. He had crawled past William and Shelly, the extreme skeleton crew that was left of the usually much more robust night guard, both settling in after their last rounds. There was a bit of maintenance going on with some very hazardous chemicals, which meant much of the building had been cleared out for the weekend for safety, but there were still a couple of guards for the peace of mind of the research scientists and the museum partners.

Jensen mused that it was unusual to see Sarif Industry Headquarters so empty. On one hand, it was incredibly convenient, as Jensen did not have to make any excuses as to why he was in a researcher’s lab on the weekend. However, given the unusual...everything else, Jensen was going to have to review the last couple of weeks of maintenance reports to see if the multiple-floor fire suppression system upgrade, and its corresponding clearing out of personnel, was indeed legitimate. He was beginning to think that there were many layers of ruse going on that were about to come unraveled.

However it was very convenient.

Once he got the lab vent’s door open, he was able to connect to the room’s interface and put a hold on the room’s motion detector, but also take a brief scan of the room, making it easier to make sure he had all the things back in the same place when he left. As he connected, he saw the subroutine that Pritchard had set up, looping the blank room over and over. It was small and unobtrusive, hard to spot unless you knew it was going to be there. 

Good to be reminded of the extreme competency of your co-workers, especially when their achiviments are less tangible.

After that, it was simple to lower himself down, unnecessarily soundlesslessly, yet still carefully. He stood carefully and looked around the lab, searching for anything that seemed out of place. The research labs at Sarif were fairly standardized, and this was no different. Even with the overhead lights off, the white and chrome of the lab were as sterile as they were generic. All of the research stations were clearly labeled (with both small digital screens and multi-colored post-its providing footnotes.) When he got to Dr. Wilson’s station, if there was anything different about her area, it was that she only had a single small environmentally controlled box of twelve samples, with a thin red book and a pile of papers nearby. Jensen flipped through the papers expecting to see something very technical and incomprehensible.

He was half right. It _was_ incomprehensible, but he wasn't sure he could call what he was reading "technical.”

The first four pages were a normal corporate research memorandum. But after those first couple of pages, things started to get weird. For one thing, the diagrams started looking much more like diagrams you would see in history books about da Vinci, with scribbles of mathematical equations and weird triangles, greek letters and squiggles on the corners. The notes stopped being in English, but it wasn’t any language Jensen recognized. 

However, he had a feeling that if he knew anything about Sumerian, he might be able to pick up a couple of things.

As the papers continued, more and more of the figures had pieces missing, with circles and question marks in quadrants. And then, three blank pages, with some odd smelling gel-like substance on them. Jensen scraped a little off a corner, slipped it into a sterilized flask from the communal supply, and tucked it in his pocket. After the blank pages, the decoy corporate pages appeared again, finishing up with perfectly legitimate equations and titration schedules.

Jensen pulled up his HUD to see if there was anything he'd forgotten. Looking at the clock, he saw it was nearing two forty-five. He had fifteen minutes to straighten everything up before the next guard patrol was going to come by. He tidied the papers, making sure everything was exactly as he'd found it. He took one last look around the room and noticed something very odd.

There weren’t any computers anywhere in the lab. Sure, there were some display screens, but they were all dummy displays, just showing readouts of machines that weren’t in the lab. No keyboards, no mice. Things that looked like towers, but no wires coming out of them. There was an open laptop, but it didn’t have a keyboard, just a just a flat image of one. It was like a display model of a computer setup, all placed to look like a modern lab.

What the actual hell?

He didn’t have time to look into that though. As he secured the vent in place, he removed the hold he'd put on the motion detector. He double checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, but it was plain as day: no terminals. Some things that to a casual glance might look like them, but they weren’t connected to any network Jensen could detect. 

Stranger and stranger. He pushed himself back into the shadows, and waited for the patrol to come by. Like clockwork, from the other end of the hall, the labs started to light up as one of the night guards walked down and shined a light in. He waited, but just as the lights grew closer, they stopped, as if the guard had halted at the large fire door just before the lab. Jensen focused on the guard, but what he saw didn’t make any sense.

The guard was just walking in place, making the same motions as they would if they were checking out the lab, but not moving an inch. Jensen might not have noticed if not for the motion light in the lab. As he focused in on the guard’s face, he could see that there was a strange white mist obscuring the top half of what he could see of the guard’s face, totally obscuring her eyes.

Jensen could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as she seemed to look up in the direction of his vent, but as quickly as she did, she turned around, and withdrew as if nothing was awry.

He had to get back to Pritchard. Something was seriously wrong, and he needed answers. Hopefully he could start getting them soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: action! spirits! disaster! FIRE DOGS! I was pretty jazzed about fire dogs in my original outline, let me tell you what.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	3. Taken Out of Context I Must Seem So Strange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things start to heat up at Sarif Industries, and Jensen and Pritchard have to defend themselves against an onslaught on inhuman attacks by things from beyond the veil. Someone else is joining the fight, and only time will tell to see what side they are on.

Rather than drop in from the ceiling, Jensen took a slight detour and went to grab some of the (admittedly terrible) vending machine coffee for both Pritchard and himself before stopping back into the hacker’s office. He knew he wasn’t up for discussing what he had seen without a little caffeine, and also needed a few minutes to process before talking about it with his more than slightly combative coworker. 

“Pritchard, I’m on my way, and you are not going to believe what I saw in the lab,” he said, opening his infolink as he pushed some buttons on the machine.

“Jensen!” Pritchard sounded out of breath. “Where are you? Did you not hear me before?”

“No, there’s been radio silence since I left.” Jensen looked around the room, trying to spot anything out of place, the coffee machine flashing and forgotten. Nothing in the admittedly boring break room looked strange, but that meant little. Nothing tonight was coming together in a sensical manner. “What’s the situation?”

“Your little mage friend decided that playing the defensive wasn’t a winning strategy,” said Pritchard, a strange howling coming over the audio connection. “There are _things_ bubbling up from the floor in the lobby, and they are climbing up the stairs. There were a lot of them, but I think they’ve all coalesced into one big entity now, but I can’t be sure. I’ve been trying to keep them at bay by locking and electrifying the doors, but it’s only slowing them down, not stopping them. I don’t know how long the doors will hold!”

“I’m a floor above you, and if I can’t come through the halls, I’ll come down through the auditory lab.” Jensen turned on his heel, legging it for the hacker’s office. “Get me a visual, a path, and I’ll get to you.”

A map popped up on his HUD, showing a straightforward if non-obvious route. He started running, trusting Pritchard. In a smaller window, a live feed of the horrors popped up, and Jensen could see why Pritchard was so rattled.

What was coming up the stairs could only be called a mass, mottled with black and red splotches, with screaming faces roiling as they pushed in and out of the form. Five feet wide and rolling through itself as it moved, it had broken through the first set of doors. Large burns on the walls behind showed where it had slammed its way through, with no sign of slowing down.

In moments, Jensen was jumping up and swinging over a heating duct, sliding over the doorway and landing with a thud, but he let his momentum carry him through so he didn’t slow down. There was no time to linger. In the scant minutes it took him to reach Pritchard’s office, he could hear the meaty pounding at the stairway door. The office clicked open feet before he slammed into it, letting him rush in unhindered.

“Give me an update, Francis.” Jensen pulled the doors shut, looking through the transparent glass wall for movement. “What happened after I left?”

“As soon as you got to the pharmacology wing, parts of the building started losing power,” said Pritchard, typing away at the computer, hopping from terminal to terminal, bringing up cameras and quickly flipping through the feeds. “I was trying to track down the cause when something started screaming outside.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Jensen peer out the window, seeing if he could get a glance at the form.

“I tried to reach you, but all transmissions were scrambled until you called in.” Pritchard scowled. “And then there were a half dozen people-shaped goo-things scrambling through the lobby. I had other things on my mind.”

“Well, with what I saw down in the lab, I can’t say I’m surprised we’re having comms issues. It seems like reality is fucked all over the place.” Jensen zoomed in on the figure as it slammed into the door. It looked like it was flinching back from the electric shock. Interesting.

“How bad was it down there?”

“Given what’s attacking the door right now? It was just unsettling.” Jensen gave a brief rundown of the guard and the lab, highlighting the lack of computers and the paper research. “They aren’t slowing down out there. The electricity is hurting them, but we don’t have enough to stop more of them. Get what you can, and let’s load out.”

“Well, that explains why no one was picking up their comms.” Pritchard moved to the monitor in the corner. “Send those notes over here, I’m almost ready. You said Dr. Wilson didn’t have a computer anywhere in the lab?”

“Yeah, and I didn’t see an office listed for her in the directory.” Jensen scrolled through her file, trying to make sense of it all. “I mean, even if that was all her research in the lab, there weren’t nearly enough papers for those to be all of her notes. She’s been working here for…”

“Now, that’s the question isn’t it.” Pritchard looked at his computer, then up at Jensen. He pointed to two open windows, each showing a completely different woman. Sure, they both had brown hair, blue eyes, and non-descript features but they were clearly not the same person. “Here’s where things get really interesting. The person that checked in yesterday at the desk as Dr. Wilson has been working here three months. According to security tapes and check-in logs, she was out for some extended sick leave earlier this year. When she came back, no one seemed to notice that she was a completely different person. Dr. Wilson is hiding something, and I have a feeling we’re only scratching the surface of it.”

With a crash, the creature burst through the door in the hall, leaving no more time to pore over data. Jensen gestured for Pritchard to get behind him, as he prepared himself to cover their exit. Pritchard typed some quick commands to unlock the door, disconnected his laptop from the terminal and shoved it into a bag, and fell in line, hunching down behind Jensen’s defensive crouch. Jensen locked eyes with Pritchard, and gestured decisively: he’d go in first and distract the creatures, the hacker would peel off to the left and make a break for the stairs. He’d cover the retreat and follow, and they would regroup below. With a grim look, Pritchard gripped his bag and nodded, ready to run.

Seeing the damage the electricity had been doing, Jensen readied his stun gun on his hip, but started out with a handgun to try and do some physical damage. With a roll, he pushed open the door, pistol in hand, sweeping into the middle of the entryway like a hawk, coat billowing in an exaggerated manner to cover Pritchard sneaking to the stairway. 

The first thing that became apparent as Jensen aimed his gun at the oncoming horde was that the electrical barrier had managed to take down a good deal of the mass on the body slamming into it. The creature's body still sizzled, its fallen chunks laying across the threshold, twitching slightly as they seemed to dissolve.

Even with parts of it rotting and fizzing in the air, as it turned and spotted him despite an unmistakable lack of eyes, it gathered itself up and rotated, readying itself to push forward and gain ground. The half-human faces he had spotted before were pushing through the ooze, reaching forward, backward, every which way including straight towards Jensen, open mawed and silently screaming, but not really looking in the direction the mass was trying to move.

All in all, it was a nightmare made flesh. Or what passes as flesh. It was absolutely a nightmare in any case.

Jensen leveled his sights at the red and black creature, squeezing off a handful of shots into the nearest screaming face, grouping them tightly in the blank, terrifying eyeless sockets. 

Instead of sinking into the “flesh” of the creature, the bullets instead struck, slowed down, and fell to the ground with an almost graceful tumble, dissolving just like the chunks of itself that had been beaten loose by electricty. 

“Shit,” muttered Jensen, glancing over to Pritchard, who was clearing the doors to the far side of the hall, into the lobby. The glass walls showed a clear path to the front doors, but only if the two creatures stayed focused on him. And only if they were alone.

Jensen retreated another five feet and pulled out his stun gun. Aiming it at the center of the mass, Jensen fired a stun round, not expecting much of a result. He was again surprised, as the round sunk down into the center of the mass and then electrified, lighting up the whole creature in a kind of spectacle that was usually reserved for the fourth of July.

Unfortunately, while impressive to behold, the display did little to slow the creature down. In the fading of the sparks, it still pushed onwards, looking far less affected by it than by the door’s defenses. 

Jensen looked over to see that Pritchard was doing a very capable job of moving from one bit of cover to the next, keeping something opaque between him and the creatures moving in. That was great, because it meant when Jensen grabbed an entire concrete planter, and threw it at the creature, Pritchard was still completely out of sight as he stumbled and squawked in panic.

The planter did slightly better than the bullets, actually causing the creature to stumble back a few feet. It even it took a chunk of the red out before dissolving away. However, the creature was no longer taking a leisurely approach.

Almost like a science fair volcano, the mass surged forward, sending tendrils in a star-like grasp toward Jensen at alarming speed. It was only thanks to his enhanced reflexes that he was able to roll out of the way. He slammed into a window hard enough to cause a spiderweb crack up the bottom.

He was on his feet and diving for the next bit of cover when a wet chunk of the creature flew past him, not connected to anything, seemingly tossed like a baseball and narrowly missing his shoulder. He felt and heard it more than he saw it, an unnatural chill leaching the warmth from the air and the far away sound of a wailing cry hissing past his ear. 

“What was that?” yelled Pritchard, darting his head out from behind a concrete half-wall next to the entry stairs. “Did that thing just toss itself at you?”

“Keep moving!” Jensen shuddered as he broke cover and ran for the lobby. Pritchard cleared the doorframe moments before Jensen reached it, but not before a finger-thin tendril of ooze snaked forward and smacked him in the back of the neck.

The effect was instantaneous and terrifying. Pritchard seized up like he'd been electrified, a web of red spreading all over him, causing him to step back into the hall, but not fall. Just stand there, paralyzed and spasming.

Jensen ran up to him, and the same cold screaming energy was radiating off Pritchard. A pulse of sickening...something, almost like light, but moving like it was viscious...pulsed back over the tendril. It moved fast, faster than it had any right to, and as it connected with the main mass, it flared once and the creature grew, just a little bit.

That was _so very_ not good.

Going on instinct, Jensen pulled out his stun pistol and aimed it squarely at the center of the tendril, firing a couple of shots, hoping to disrupt the connection. As the electricity from the round hit the ooze, the tendril thinned, but didn’t break. He reached down and grabbed a fallen piece of rock and slammed it in the middle of the electrical arch, hoping it would be enough to break the connection. 

It seemed to work: the red and black ooze cracked and fell to the ground, dissolving into mist as the impact bisected it. Pritchard stumbled forward, gasping as the red web faded into mist. Jensen didn't wait to see the creature's reaction. He ran toward Pritchard and ducked under his arm, hurrying him along, one hand flat against his back with an urgent pressure that nearly knocked Pritchard off his feet.

“Shit!” Pritchard coughed, stumbling to keep up with Jensen as they nearly flew down the stairs, ducking into one of the offices on the far side of the room, about halfway through the lobby, just past a column. Once behind the cover of a desk, Jensen let Pritchard stand on his own, leaning heavily against the desk, eyes still unfocused.

“Are you ok?” asked Jensen, looking around the corner to see where their pursuer was. They had not gained as much distance as he would have hoped: the creature had changed color, no longer a mix of red and black, but more of a static-filled red field, with white popping colors coming through the mass. It had also expanded to the size of a car, and was extending thin tentacles to the walls, blocking doorways and light fixtures as it grew. It was still moving slowly, but steadily in the direction of the exit. “What did that thing do?”

“It felt like it was draining the life out of me.” Pritchard shuddered and looked around the office as he gathered himself. He sat for a second, before pulling out his laptop, a look of grim determination on his face. “We can’t let it leave, I’m seeing what I can access from here. Give me a minute.”

“You say that like we know what this is,” muttered Jensen, looking over the rest of the lobby, trying to see where their exit from this office would be if everything went as badly as he feared. They had some cover where they were, but if the monster kept expanding, they really wouldn't have a lot of options.

The room they were in didn’t have a lot going for it. It was an office in name only: part of a block of space for when employees from the field visited the main office. The desks were all lightly stocked with monitors, network connections, and basic supplies, but lacked any real useful differentiating items. Which made the space fine to hole up in, but terrible for formulating any kind of plan. As Pritchard sat with his back against the wall, furiously typing into his laptop, Jensen looked over their exit strategies if the creature reached the office. Maybe that was the next step, and not spiraling into despair.

First, there were a couple of vents, and sure, he could hustle through them, but Pritchard would be a lot slower. And that was only if they were clear. He had long since stopped hoping anything about this mess would be easy. Second, they could make a break for the door, but as Pritchard had said, they would have to do something about that creature, and even if it didn’t rush straight for them and they went through some walls, it was getting too big to ignore. Third, they could rush it, and hope that by making itself huge, it had thinned itself out and would be easier to take down. That seemed blatantly suicidal, but in the absence of any other ideas he guessed it was a Saturday night, might as well go out with a bang. 

“I’m going to go take a run at that thing.” Jensen leaned down to Pritchard, keeping an eye on the lobby. “Maybe if I throw more damage at it, it will do something different?”

“Hold up a second before you run off hard head first.” Pritchard squinted at his screen. “There’s…something strange out in the courtyard.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”

“Well, the cameras are fritzing out, so I can’t get a clear picture, but does this look like the silhouette of a group of people? Maybe someone observing the situation from outside?” Pritchard pointed at a corner of the screen, towards the top of a building across the street.

Jensen leaned into the laptop, looking at the shadows. At the very edge of the security camera’s range, there was a reflection in the building, a shadow of 4-5 people, all clumped together. If he was looking at it correctly, as distorted in the reflections as it was, they were watching the building.

Great. Just...great. What fresh hell was _this_.

“I don’t know what we do about that now,” said Jensen, looking grimly over at Pritchard. “But it does limit our exits. Keep an eye on them while I make a dash to the other side and pull the blob’s attention.”

“Be careful, Jensen. When that thing touched me, it was like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I’m not sure what it would do to someone with all of your augments. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot.”

“Well, maybe I can pull a wall down onto it.” Jensen jumped for an air vent and pushed himself inside. “But I’ve got to try something. If we just stay in here we are sitting ducks.”

It didn’t take long to slide to the other side of the lobby, dropping silently onto the staircase filled with post-blob-creature rubble. However, seeing the creature from the side wasn’t opening up any new clever strategies.

However, one very dumb strategy did come to mind. 

Picking up a large piece of concrete, Jensen chucked it at the creature. 

It almost looked like it was going to work. The stone was flying fast and straight, and got within a half foot of the monster’s mass before it was engulfed by the newly electrified goo

While the creature absorbed the rock with almost no visible damage, its retaliation was enormous. The side nearest Jensen exploded in tendrils, like cheese in a microwave, reaching across the atrium with enough force to shatter rock. Jensen dove out of the way, only narrowly missing being harpooned by a lance of electrified goo as he rolled down the stairs. He scrambled to his feet, ready to run, but the goo stayed stuck, throbbing and pulsing, gathering mass and power as it loomed over the entryway, a web of black and red and pain spanning the sky.

Well. Fuck.

The chunk of masonry had been about as effective as throwing a pebble at a thunderstorm, but it did tell Jensen something important about the creature. Even though it didn't have eyes, it could see, and it was not wasting energy on dealing with threats that were far away, but it retaliated with enormous force if pushed.

He wasn't sure what he could do with the information yet, but he was running out of ideas, and something had to give.

“Holy shit! What're those?” said Pritchard into Jensen's ear, too loud and panicked, causing him to wince as he glanced toward Pritchard's location. 

Two huge…dogs? They were probably dogs. They looked more like dogs than anything else, but they were on fire. Not burning. No, they were made of fire, every part of them: teeth, fur, claws, and eyes, built and swimming with layers and layers of different heats of fire.

Moving protectively and unconsciously, Jensen backed towards the wall, pulling out his stun pistol, and training it on the one nearing Pritchard's location. He wasn’t exactly sure what he could do against these creatures, but he was damned sure he could slow them down.

Fortunately, the dogs had other ideas. They apparently had no interest in either Jensen or unseen targets, but instead ran towards the web of creature now spanning the room behind him. The dogs ran past and it was all Jensen could do to stare while, as one, they vaulted off the receptionist's desk like a pair of Olympic gymnasts and attacked the creature with flaming jaws.

The entire lobby filled with inhuman wailing as the dogs savaged the creature, fire and redness flying haphazardly about, splattering everywhere. They seemed to be moving in concert, raking down the web, ricocheting off the steps and each other, trying to burn as much of it as they could. And unlike against Jensen's small attacks, the web creature roared to fully animated life, shaking and writhing, trying to entangle and consume its newly acquired assailants.

A flaming blob of creature landed next to Jensen with a splat, shaking him out of his stunned observation. This was no time to watch the show. They had to move.

“Pritchard, pack up,” said Jensen, entering an office and crawling into a vent, making his way back to the hacker. “We've gotta use this distraction to our advantage and get out of here.”

“But…what are they?”

“Not attacking us right now, and if we are lucky, not at all.” He slid through the vent. “And I have a feeling that the group you spotted on that building over there is going to have more information. But first, getting you out of the lobby and someplace that isn't directly in the path of death seems like the best idea."

By the time Jensen came tumbling out of the vent, Pritchard had gotten disconnected from the network, and was ready to move. A loud crash outside was just the cover they needed, as one of the dogs grabbed a desk in its mouth and threw it across the hall, smashing a skylight down onto the blob, showering sparks everywhere. As the light fell, an unnatural wind seemed to pick up, buffeting back at the monster, filling the air with dust and debris. 

It was now or never. Jensen grabbed Pritchard by the wrist.

They ran out the side hall, using the general chaos as cover for their escape. Not only were the two dogs still going absolute ham on the monster, but there was some other kind of light show happening as well. Jensen almost wanted to stick around and see what it was, but he knew they weren’t going to get a second chance at escaping. As they ran down the row of offices, Jensen directed Pritchard into one with an exterior wall. Without ceremony, Jensen punched a hole through to the outside, making them an exit.

“Not what I would call elegant.” Pritchard stepped over the concrete wall onto the grass outside. 

“Wasn’t asking for a critique, Francis.” Jensen looked over his shoulder to see if anything had followed them. The coast seemed clear, but he wasn’t sure if that meant anything. “What do you think about dropping in on our friends?”

“I think it’s probably the right move, but I’ll be about as useful as a paperweight unless I can get jacked in someplace.” Pritchard took in the surrounding buildings. He pointed over at the office building just across the alley. “Think you can get that window open?”

“As long as you don’t care about elegance, sure,” said Jensen, scanning the room for signs of life or security. Seeing neither, he jumped up, and opened the window with little effort. Looking down, he smiled at Pritchard. “Can you make this jump, or do you need a hand?”

“Ha. Ha. Ha.” Pritchard glared. “No, mister smart-ass, I can’t make that jump. Now give me a hand, and go menace someone else, will you?”

“If you insist.” Jensen hopped down and helped Pritchard onto his back before jumping back to the office, depositing the hacker to connect to the network. Once he was sure Pritchard was steady, he launched out the window, on his way to where they had spotted those shadows.

He took the long way around, circling back so he could come up on the target’s blind side. If they were watching the building, it was unlikely they were also going to be looking very closely at a single person coming to spy on them, but he couldn’t afford to be sloppy. It was not a quick process, but it was better than blowing his whole cover.

Fortunately, by the time he made his way to a rooftop within sight of the mystery team, Pritchard came through with some great news.

“Ok, I’ve hacked my way into some cameras, and I have eyes on their location.” A fuzzy picture came on in the lower right hand corner of Jensen's HUD. “Looks like there are at least seven of them on the roof. I see two people plugged into what are probably decks, couple of people with sniper rifles, one...no, make that two people who are glowing and sitting, and I think one person as a lookout. I don’t see the ninja person you were talking about, but then, I’m not sure I would.”

“Tell me more about that lookout. Where are they?”

“They are on top of the fire escape,” said Pritchard, smugness coming over the info link. “However, they finally got sloppy, and I’ve managed to hack their comms. Linking you in now.”

“...have cleared the upper levels, but we’ve lost visuals on the main level,” came a male voice in Jensen’s ear. He was pretty sure it was the lookout who was coordinating the rest of the group. He stayed perched on his own lookout point and kept listening. “Any updates from the bottom floors?”

“Nothing since theta took out his comms unit,” replied the voice of a young woman, her tone deep and scratchy, but also unconcerned. “He has about twenty minutes before we should be worried, but I think we are quickly reaching plan F on our exit routes. Unless something really unexpected comes out of the basement, that is.”

“I think we passed plan F a while ago. But copy. Gamma, how are the twins?”

“Holding their own,” said a third voice, low and gruff. With the slight shifting from his vantage point, Jensen was pretty sure it was one of the snipers. “But the goop in there is nasty. Did we see if the corps in there got out?”

“If you didn’t see them, we lost sight of them,” said the lookout, sounding frustrated. “They must be locked down in an office. We may need to sweep them out if we have to do something more extreme.”

“Seriously?” said the sniper. “Why can’t we leave ‘em? They signed up for this.”

“We aren’t here to leave collateral damage,” said the lookout, tone final. “We will not be sloppy because they are unlucky enough to be infested. Hold pattern until we get more information.”

Jensen opened the other channel. “Pritchard, there’s still someone in the building. But something weird is going on.”

“With a monster attacking the lobby, Jensen?” Sarcasm dripped from Pritchard's voice. “However did you pick that out of a simple conversation? I’m seeing if I can get eyes back inside. You keep perching, maybe something will come by you can swoop up.”

Jensen maneuvered closer to the rooftop that held the mystery group, trying to see if there were any other unspeaking players. As he closed in, he saw that one of the figures plugged into the ‘deck’ was absolutely the hacker from before, so it was no question they were dealing with the same group. While Sarif seemed pretty locked down, the intruders weren’t looking anywhere else, but he guessed that wasn’t surprising. They probably didn't expect to have any other people hunting them while they were attacking the building.

Though, how much were they attacking the building? It didn’t seem like the big monster was with them. Or if it was, they were putting on a big show for the no one they expected to be watching. 

More questions, no answers, and no clear paths forward. He could start thinning out the herd, but with at least one person still unaccounted for, he needed more intel before making a move. He wasn’t in a big hurry to get jumped again, especially when they already had their snipers locked and loaded.

He settled in and waited until more information presented itself. Given the veritable light and fire-pony show happening in the lobby across the street below, he doubted he'd be waiting long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, fire dogs! And other messed up spirits! We're starting to get real Shadowrun-y now, man! Yeah, this chapter is as long as the first two combined, but you know how things happen.
> 
> POV shift next chapter, y'all. Let's see what the other team has to say about some of this mess.


	4. I Cannot Name This, I Cannot Explain This. And Really I Don’t Want to, Just Call Me Shameless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every story has at least one other side. Every plan should have a back up. Every magic trick has the buy in, the turn, and the prestige. 
> 
> In other words, a lot of things were happening at Sarif that night. While Jensen and Pritchard are distracted by fleeing for their lives, someone has snuck into the basement and is finding their own bad time.
> 
> PoV shift to the runners!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING on this chapter: contains some passive/background medical experimentation and some not background body horror elements. 
> 
> I would call them mild, but they don't bother me in general, so I am warning on them.

The worst thing about entering corporate buildings, in Aelif’s opinion, was that they were corporate buildings, followed closely by the fact you were entering them. It was vaguely better when you were doing so through the air vents with the intent to do more than a small amount of mayhem, as opposed to walking through their lobbies pretending you weren’t going to eventually rob them, but only slightly. 

He wasn’t currently in a vent, and was in fact trying to cut himself out of a burning, sticky web of fleshy goo, while the echoing screams of a ghost-bound trap were ringing in his ears, but on principle it was still the same. 

He had just hacked his arm free when a decidedly normal-looking scientist came walking around the corner, her hair tucked up in two practical buns. She had a long white coat over a sensible dark pantsuit, and a thick pair of glasses sliding down her owlish eyes. Aelif recognised her from their recon: it was Dr. Meredith Wilson.

“My, my, my, what do we have here?” Dr. Wilson looked at the screaming mess, then back at Aelif, all in black and ready to run. “Seems to be quite a racket out here.”

“Dr. Wilson,” said Aelif, slipping his knife into its sheath. “You don’t know who I am, but you need to trust me. You are in terrible danger.”

“Oh, am I?” she said, amusement in her voice. Her eyes glowed briefly, she waved her hand and the screaming finally ended. “I’m not sure _I_ am the one who is in danger here.”

“It was worth a shot.” He tossed a smoke pellet on the floor and turned on his heel to sprint down the hallway.

It was at times like this he appreciated that Iris, with her skills as a child of the matrix, had the security so much on lockdown that he didn’t have to worry about being seen. Frying each camera he came across would be seriously tedious.

‘Though to be fair, a little tedium might be a change of pace,’ he thought, flipping backwards as a bolt of crackling red energy came flying down the hall. He shoulder-checked the door to the left, spinning into a lab, breaking line of sight with the furious mage at the end of the hall. 

“I knew we had a vermin problem,” came Dr. Wilson's voice from the end of the hall behind him. The furious mage sounded deceptively calm, despite the flesh-melting magic she was flinging after him. “But I never thought I would have to hunt down the mice myself.”

Aelif did not rise to her bait. He hated when they tried to be funny.

Nothing this evening had gone to plan. That they were even in Sarif's headquarters meant they had already reached plan D, which was far from ideal. They were professionals: not every minor setback required a brand new plan. There were sub-contingencies for things that were reasonable to assume might happen. For example, Iris getting tranqued by that fucking nightmare of a cyberzombie in the form of a head of security hadn’t even triggered a new plan. It just made their exit considerably less clean. And forced them to try out experimental tech in the middle of a job.

You know. Like _professionals._

Aelif had not wanted to take this job. Detroit was a garbage town, filled with flesh peddlers and rude assholes. People who thought that because they were on the bleeding edge of augmentation, they had any idea about the dozens of non-technological routes the powerful were using to push their way into more money, more influence. It was the kind of stupidity and arrogance that got people killed.

But killing those people was often very profitable, so here he was.

Admittedly, this leg of the job was supposed to be light on stabbing. He didn’t even have a sword on him, just a couple of knives. The plan had been to make a big enough fuss upstairs that he could slip into the basement labs and grab whatever Dr. Meredith Wilson had gotten delivered to her lab despite their best efforts. While the shipping container had contained some good information, they were missing some key information, and this was the next best place to look. No one should have been in these labs.

And to be incredibly fair, there were almost no people in the building at all: at first it had seemed it was only the head of physical security, who was only there because of the stupid shipping mistake; the head of cyber security, who was probably there for the same reason; and a handful of guards in the basement. And while the first two were absolutely real people, the latter turned out to be something else entirely. 

The big problem with fighting mages was that the more time you had to prepare, the better the fight tended to go. In addition to the blood spirits running rampant through the main floor, there were some other pieces of vicious bullshit draining the life out of security guards, leaving behind illusions of the people they used to be. Some kind of early warning system, maybe. Aelif might have been impressed if it weren’t so fucking creepy. 

This particular guard had exploded into a trap of sticky webbing, pinning him to the ground, covered in a mix of fleshy viscera as the mage in residence made her way to the trap. It was only Aelif's quick reflexes and his ability to cut himself loose that had allowed him to get a head start before Dr. Wilson started to put more active defenses into play.

He had been waiting for the patrolling guard to return to her desk, when he noticed she had some kind of magical binding on her eyes, rendering her unable to see what she was supposed to be watching against. However, when he went to subdue her, it turned out to be a goddamned trap. One set by someone, or _someones_ , who had time to make everything really difficult for someone trying to avoid leaving a lot of evidence behind.

He would guess _none_ of the handful of guards down here were real people. They were all well-crafted illusions, made to _scream_ at physical interaction. If Aelif were to apply his professional opinion, he would posit the mages had bound the eyes shut to avoid false positives merely from interacting with surroundings, but his sympathy was limited as his ears were still ringing and he was covered in sticky webbing.

Preparation went hand in hand with surprise. It was clear Dr. Wilson had made full use of her home field advantage, but if Aelif stopped running and actually started flinging spells he might lose the only small element of surprise he had left: his own magical ability. Though, given how much had gone wrong already, Dr. Wilson probably already knew all about him, and was just stalking him from the astral with spirits, waiting for him to slip up and make a magical mistake.

Before Dr. Wilson cleared the corner, Aelif managed to dive into a vent and out of sight. He crawled to another lab, moving as silently and as quickly as he could. Which under normal circumstances was remarkably swift and silent, but he typically wasn’t having the building thrown at him, so he did his best.

He was extremely irritated that he even had to deal with a mage. According to their intel, this should have been an easy in-and-out. They knew that some part of the shipment had come here, so they hoped they could nip in and grab what they had missed. They had been sure none of the magic users tangled up in this mess would be working in this building filled with augmentations and pain, because working magic in the middle of technology and agony was usually reserved for people that Aelif had no desire to get to know better.

But here he was. Getting to know them through the most visceral forms of combat. 

_Delightful_.

Two months ago, Aelif, as well as a couple of runners he had been working with for a couple of years, had been retained by an annoyingly insistent and powerful individual to deal with ‘a group of fools who were messing about in magics that they had no business touching.’

Typically there was enough happening in Seattle that they as primarily PNW-based runners weren’t interested in crossing the country to stick their noses in another city's problems. But once they started looking into it, they realized they had less choice than they thought. When it became clear the magics in question were more far-reaching than at first appeared, they sucked it up, took the meager support they were given and made their way to Detroit. 

Which left Aelif sliding out of a vent, into a lab which would have filled an H.R. Giger artbook. Flayed disembodied limbs of various creatures were hooked up to diagnostic machines, their circulatory systems completely replaced with an artificial blood-like substance. There were fleshy eyes connected to other, robotic eyes, seeing nothing, but looking at everything.

Aelif didn’t have enough time to delve into what the setups were testing, or guess which would feature heavily in his nightmares later, but there was a lot going on here. He spotted what looked like a set of reflex experiments, numerous muscle augmentations on the counter in various states of deconstruction. He tried not to think about his own limbs being cut up and poked at as he moved underneath the tables to make his way through. 

Dr. Wilson was a strange one. Even in preliminary research, she had stuck out as a nexus of oddity. Her background didn’t quite line up when examined, even though the examination took quite a bit of digging for things to fall apart. She was the driving force behind the exhibitory partnership between the museum and Sarif, the first of its kind and apparently a cover for much more nefarious purposes. She had also managed to avoid being photographed, which for someone participating in very public research became suspicious quickly.

That she turned out to be a fucking _blood mage_ , using the pain and sacrifice of medical science to fuel magic for her own personal gain, was both a very terrible surprise and also the missing piece of a puzzle Aelif really hadn't wanted to solve this way. Aelif had known there would be some magic defenses involved, but he thought the doctor was more of a patsy than a hands-on practitioner of the darkest of arts.

And she was going to be _very_ hands-on unless he figured out a way to get out of here.

As Dr. Wilson continued ripping apart the room he had just left, he had a couple of moments to plan before running for his life again. He quickly scanned the room for his next move, when he noticed something weird. Behind one of the nightmarish experiments, one of the walls was slightly a different color than the ones around it. It was barely noticeable, but his angle, the low light, and his desperate searching made the different wall very suspicious.

He crawled over to the wall and as he traced his fingers along the edge, he could feel that it was a slightly different temperature than the rest of the room. On its seam he found a small handle, nothing fancy, just a metal ring set in the masked drywall. 

The wall was a hidden pocket door.

Interesting. Probably not an escape, but maybe a place to lay low until he found a clear way out. Unless, of course, it was alarmed, in which it would likely bring Dr. Wilson right to him and end this chase right now.

The potential alarm, at least, he could do something about. He reached into his bag and pulled out a small device. It had been developed by Iris, but it was specialized, and one of the main reasons he had to take his ear piece out while roaming these halls. It was an EMP wave scanner that would anchor to a wall, send out a localized signal, then hijack and overload any alarms and cameras in a room. He had found that while usually alarms and cameras were controlled remotely, having something in case of a closed system was invaluable in their line of work.

He pushed the device into the wall and hit the button, counting to ten before sliding the door open just enough to slip through, then sliding it closed again. 

When he looked at what was in the room, he nearly reopened the door and took his chances with Dr. Wilson’s flesh withering magic.

On the wall before him was an entire, well, he guessed he would call it a body, but it was awfully hard to tell at this point. Every limb had been cut open and dissected, with various mechanical objects and metal wires woven in between veins and tendons. He supposed what he saw could be an experiment, but he wasn’t sure what anyone would be trying to figure out, except for how much pain you could pump into a person. He was also fairly sure it wasn’t Sarif standard procedure to contain experimentations with a hexagram inscribed with alchemical symbols, or to wrap key parts of the body with white lamb-skin strips covered with the same, but he could be mistaken.

He knew he wasn’t, but he supposed he _could_ be. 

As he stepped forward, the scene turned from disturbing to truly horrifying, because he noticed that the lungs, which were protected by some kind of red cloth, were rising and lowering nearly imperceptibly. A wave of revulsion went through him. This _thing_ was still alive.

Aelif dragged his eyes away from that abomination, and instead tried to focus on what he could gather about the room. Apart from the large experiment, there were two small standing desks with trays of standard surgeon’s tools, as well as a couple more specialized pieces he assumed worked with augmentations. However, none of them were inscribed with runes or sigils, so it was unlikely that they were enchanted. The only way to be sure would be to look with astral perception, but there was no way in hell he was doing that in the same room as the thing behind him. 

So all he had was his academic knowledge of magic, which thankfully could get him someplace. He knelt down to examine the hexagram more closely, to see what was written there in finer detail. What he could intuit, it looked like they were using the blood and pain to charge some kind of mystical reservoir, then channeling it through the building or a person to another location. It meant that if he put the person here out of their misery, he might be able to do some real damage on his way out.

And hopefully it would be distracting. Well, there was something to be said for making a big enough mess to sneak out in the rubble. 

He heard a crash behind him, meaning Dr. Wilson had probably reached the lab. He was out of time. 

He was almost at the end of his options, so he reached into his bag and pulled out the lead box that held his earpiece. He stuck it in his ear, connecting back into his comms. It should hold, now that the initial pulse had taken out the alarms, but he and electronics always had a touch-and-go relationship.

“Delta, this is theta, I have a situation,” he said, planning his destruction of the experiment while he gave Johnny an update.

“Theta? Why are you back on comms?” said Johnny, the coordinating voice on the other end of the line. “Keep the line clear, all. Theta, it’s yours, what’s happening?”

“I’m backed into a corner down here.” He tightened the wrappings on his wrists and braced himself to move. “In case this goes poorly, let the twins know: it’s worse than we thought. The bastards are experimenting on living subjects, using blood and pain to fuel some kind of magic battery. I’m going to destroy the one I found, but I don’t know if it will stop the mage I found down here. Also, Dr. Wilson is that mage, is not a passive participant, and is an absolutely active player. I’ll do what damage I can”

“Theta,” said Johnny, his tone grim. “You need to get out of there. This is much worse than we were expecting.”

“Yeah, I’m working on it,” he said, as the wall shook. “I’m going to have to break cover and try something wild, so if you can find me a distraction, it would be super helpful. It’s fifty-fifty that I’m going to ruin my earpiece trying to blow my way out of here, so I don’t know if I’ll be reachable after this. I’ll try to regroup at the temporary base, but if you’ve cleared, I’ll take the long way back to the rendezvous point.”

“Ok, we are going to go plan M on exit routes,” muttered Johnny. Aelif managed to feel a little bit bad about complicating the whole thing. “The twins have nearly taken down the blood spirit, so they can pull out, and we should be able to retreat.”

“Great.” Aelif cracked his neck. Here went nothing. “Well, I hope to be running out in five minutes, but the tantrum that’s being thrown on the other side of the wall is pretty extreme, so it might take a little bit more time. Did we clear out all the normies?”

“We lost eyes on them,” said Johnny, sounding entirely too tired for a back and forth on it. It’s not like they had time for it anyway.

“How long ago? You’ve checked your backs, right? If I make it out of here alive, I’d prefer not to have to deal with round two.”

“Ha, ha,” said Johnny, his tone flat. “Now get out of there, so we can leave.”

“Understood. Theta out.” 

He unsheathed one of his knives, looked at the experiment and sighed. There was a crash behind him that sounded distinctly like the flipping of a table, so he figured now was as good a time as any.

“I’m sorry about this,” he said, under his breath, feeling a weird mix of something like pity and anger in his chest. He didn’t like it. “But we’re going to stop this. Hopefully.”

With a slash, he cut through the neck of the person, following up with some decisive swipes through the lungs and finishing by breaking the symbols on the white strips as quickly as possible.

As he stabbed through blood-soaked fabric, the room behind him filled with an enraged scream, but the crashing did not get any softer. If anything, it seemed to grow more focused.

 _Fuck._ This was probably a not good idea anyway.

In for a penny, in for a pound. He readied his knife and kicked open the door, coming face to face again with Dr. Wilson.

“You!” she yelled, blood pouring out of her nose, fury in her eyes. Her hands were glowing in magical fury, but she hesitated flinging destruction into what was now obviously _her_ secret magical den.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Aelif grabbed an erlimyer flask and tossed it at her face. As she dodged to the side, narrowly escaping a face full of glass, she was unable to avoid his main attack: the remains of her victim pulled off the wall, flung at high velocity with magic.  
As the metal, flesh, and bone flew across the room and collided with Dr. Wilson, it pushed her backwards into the cabinets. As she screamed, Aelif leapt over the table, into the hall, and started running towards the main lobby. If he was lucky, that would give him enough time to get a fair distance.

He had only made it about twenty feet before the glass walls exploded at his heels.

So much for luck. He tucked his head down and tried to pull as much speed as he could.

Hopefully it would be enough.

~~ 

Johnny Rocket could feel a stress migraine forming under his right eye. Nothing about tonight had gone to plan. He had a hacker who was just coming out of an industrial strength tranq, pissed off and dropping cameras left and right, a ninja-mage who called in and might be burning down a multi-billion dollar building, and a job that was going more sideways than a prop plane at a county fair showing off for the farmer’s daughter. Not to mention the MIA heads of security and cyber-sec that had gone missing in the middle of the chaos. 

He was sure that the last one was going to come back and bite him. That’s just how tonight was going. 

He could use a scotch, a break, and a single goddamn clue as to why this job had gotten so complicated, but he wasn’t going to get those things any time soon. 

“Uh...delta? I have our plan M potentially incoming,” said their decker, Johana. She was fairly new to their crew, but she'd made the trip from Seattle to Detroit with little complaining. He did wish she were a little more confident, but she was very good at vehicles. “But it’s going to take five minutes minimum to get here. Just letting you know.”

“That’s fine, epsilon.” Johnny tried to keep his sigh firmly behind his gums. “Need a status report on the twins.”

“They just finished up on the monster,” said Boris, their spotter. His job was to have one eye on his sniper scope watching the fight, and the other on the shaman brother and sister. One of the twins should be still in the astral plane finishing off the death spirit, while his sister stayed back here bodily and remotely guided her fire spirit allies, but Johnny had to take that one on faith. “They seem to have everything under control. We are just waiting on theta.”

As the sniper mentioned the mage, there was a muffled explosion from inside the building, just below the lobby, right above where the blueprint said the labs would be.

Things did not seem to be going well.

A hand covered his mouth and a very sharp blade pressed into his rib.

“I am going to need you to not make a sound,” a deep, gravelly voice said from impossibly close behind him. “Nod once if you understand.”

Yeah, things were _really_ not going well.

Johnny nodded once. Neither the hand nor the blade moved, but on the plus side, he wasn’t dead. 

“I don’t think we are at cross purposes here,” said the man, sounding very reasonable despite his actions. “However, given you have someone breaking into the basement, I really need to know why you’re here tonight. Let’s discuss options…”

Any such discussion was cut short by a burst of static over the comms, causing everyone on the line to wince, and also, interestingly enough, causing the hand over Johnny’s mouth to twitch.

“...kzrt...eta, do you copy?” came Aelif’s voice, exhausted but smug. “Delta, this is theta, can you hear me?”

The hand over Johnny’s mouth released, but the blade remained, clearly reminding him of his position. If not for the dangerous sensation of the blade, he would think he was alone, but the very real feeling of his impending death kept things cozy.

“Theta, we copy,” said Johnny, starting to sweat. “Heard an explosion down there. Make it out ok?”

“Had to get Dr. Wilson off my tail,” said Aelif, his bloodthirsty grin coming clearly over the comms. “Turns out optics labs are very flammable. She did not see it coming, but _I’m_ fine. However, I am covered in most of someone else, so it probably doesn’t look like it. I have eyes on the script kiddie from inside, want me to do something about it?”

“You found the cyber security head?” said Johnny, feeling the blade twitch just a little bit, biting farther into his rib. Yeah, their lines were compromised, all right. _Fuck_.

“Yeah, he’s out of the building, but looks like he might be back online, which isn’t _great_ for us,” said Aelif, sounding both bored but also curious. “Still don’t have eyes on mister growly, though, so I should probably keep moving. Want me to knock him out, fry his stuff? I’ve got a clear shot, I could probably hit either him or his computer.”

“Don’t take the shot, just get to the rendezvous point,” said Johnny, trying very hard not to let everything go straight to hell. He felt the blade on his back disappear, and a slight shift of weight on the fire escape. “Ok, everyone. Let’s get out of here.”

“Delta,” said Johana, voice small and bird-like. “Plan M is on deck and ready whenever.”

“Copy, sigma. Everyone hold.” Johnny glanced behind him. Nothing.

Fucking sneaky assholes. And the ‘I told you so’ Aelif was going to have once they got back to the hideout. At least their exit strategy was absolutely going to make sure they weren’t followed. Distractions were the better part of valor.

“Mockingbird formation everyone,” said Johnny, giving the signal that they should assume they had ears on the line. Should keep all non-essential chatter silent, and everything else heavily coded. “Tear it down, light it up. Sigma, it’s your show.”

This was why they practiced getting out of places quickly. Their average time was under five minutes, and it was going to come in handy now. He was sure that no matter how well prepared security was, they were not going to expect what was coming next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens! We'll be back to Jensen and Pritchard next time, as they are going to have to clean up whatever the runners just threw at them for their escape plan!
> 
> Thanks again for reading! I've been excited to introduce the runner crew for a bit now, and I hope y'all like them as much as I do!


	5. Subtle as a Windowpane Standing in Your View

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plan m goes through, and it has explosive consequences for Sarif Headquarters. Jensen and Pritchard are left to clean up the mess.

Jensen leapt across the roof, keeping his eyes open for other forms moving across the buildings as he made his way back to Pritchard.

“Jensen! Where are you!” Pritchard sputtered into the infolink. “Someone’s trying to take a shot at me!”

“I heard just the same as you, Pritchard.” Jensen paused for a moment, fairly sure he saw a shape move from the fire escape to the next building, then continue away from Sarif at a steady clip. Right on the edge of the building, the figure hit the edge of the light, looking strangely wet and shiny, which tracked. “But I’m pretty sure you are in the clear. I’m more concerned about whatever is incoming. Did you get a trace on whatever 'plan m' is?”

“Been a little preoccupied, Jensen,” said Pritchard, his typing aggressive and audible even over the infolink. “Spoofing a cert to get back into the firewall wasn’t trivial, and keeping in their comms without being detected was an active matter. What were you doing? Perching?”

Jensen didn’t dignify that with a response as he made the last couple of jumps back to the office where Pritchard was holed up. As he slipped in the window, he couldn’t help but smile as he saw the hacker had moved under the desk, out of line of sight from the outside.

“It seems like they are loading out.” Jensen closed the blinds behind him as he climbed into the room. “We have to get back in the building. They said something about bodies downstairs, and that can’t possibly be good.”

“Well, unless you want to run into another mess with no intel, you are going to hold on for another five minutes.” Pritchard peeked out from under the desk, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Though if you really are in a hurry, I could stay here and keep trying to pin down their systems.”

“We have to assume they know we were listening in.” Jensen glanced out the window. “You may want to back out of any tracer you have on them.”

“I know what I’m doing ‘Mister Growly’.” Pritchard ducked back under the desk, fingers typing furiously. “If you’re going to be distracting, go back outside. Their hacker actually also knows what they are doing, but I’ve set enough dead end cul-de-sacs in the code that they won’t be able to find their way back to me.”

Jensen resisted the urge to remind Pritchard that the other man had just been yelling at him to get back here in case things had gotten physical. It had been a long night for both of them. 

Looking out the window, he could just barely see the rooftop that held the other group: knowing they were there, he could see the tell-tale signs of people moving around, but they were subtle. 

He exited the office without another word, and dropped off the fire escape to the ground, losing sight of the rooftop for the brief period of time it took to walk to the end of the alley. But as he got to the mouth of the alley, a large semi screamed past him, aiming straight for Sarif. 

“Pritchard!” Jensen ran out of the alley as the semi ramped the curb and kept driving through the courtyard. As he watched in horror, two more semis came in from side streets, also aiming directly for Sarif, not slowing down as they plowed through planters towards the building. “Are you seeing these trucks?”

“Jensen, what are yo...holy shit!” 

As Pritchard finally noticed the imminent destruction, the trucks slammed into each other, creating a huge explosion, the shockwave knocking Jensen off his feet.

It was several long moments of static and silence while the force of the explosion caused his eyes and ears to reboot. Jensen made his way up to his feet, deaf and blind. He was lucky to be far enough away there was no falling debris to avoid. His vision flickered in and out, and in the wee hours of the morning, everything was a washed out gray.

“...sen! Come i...ou he...e! Jen…” Pritchard’s voice was staticy in his infolink, sounding panicked. Jensen shook his head to try and clear some of the shock. Maybe a momentary retreat was the best call.

“Pritchard, I’m falling back,” said Jensen, not expecting it to come over the comms, but figuring something was better than nothing. Each cycle of reboot was lasting a little longer, and he was getting a little more definition in his sight. Returning to the alley was not a problem, though the jump back onto the fire escape wasn't what he would call graceful.

“Jensen, what the hell just happened?” Pritchard pulled his laptop into his bag as Jensen crawled in through the window, getting ready to go. For once this evening, it seemed the two of them were of the same mind about next moves, at least. 

“I think I figured out what ‘plan m’ was,” said Jensen, rubbing the base of his skull. “But practically, a trio of trucks just crashed into Sarif industries, and if I’m not mistaken, just covered up a lot of damage done by some things that were going to be very hard to explain.”

“And you’re never going to believe this,” said Pritchard, tone of voice letting Jensen know that not only was he going to believe it, it was going to be the most pain-in-the-ass thing he heard all evening. “ _Somehow_ all the cameras in the courtyard were fried when the explosion occurred.”

“So there’s no way we could see which way they went. Great.” Jensen sighed and looked back outside, listening to the sound of oncoming sirens. “We should get going. I’m not sure if it is going to be better if they have to call us in if we are in the building when this whole thing happened…”

“What are you talking about, Jensen?”

“Emergency vehicles are on the way, Pritchard,” said Jensen, gesturing for the hacker to follow him out the window. “They are going to want to talk to at least the head of security about the damage to the lobby, and probably to the head of cyber security about any network outages that occurred. It’s really about how much plausible deniability we want, but I think with all the chaos, no one is going to be asking too many questions of us. _I_ for one am going to just make my way over and see what the damage is before too many city workers make a mess of things.”

Pritchard looked at Jensen like he wanted to hit something. Probably one of the people who had just rammed a truck into their workplace, but Jensen wouldn’t have been that shocked if he really wanted to take a swing at the person who had just laid out the frustrating situation in front of him. It didn’t make Jensen any less right.

Pritchard pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. He checked the desk for anything left behind, and shouldered his bag. “I suppose you make a good point. Lets go play dumb. It can’t be any more stupid than the rest of this night.

~~

Both Pritchard and Jensen were right: it was very stupid mess, and the city authorities did want statements from both of them. They managed to not raise any suspicions by being there late on the weekend at the same time: both of them had plenty of work that needed to be done, plus the privileges of rank. And neither of them worked directly in the areas under construction, so their offices weren’t sealed. With how the destruction fell, there was even a clear path from the street to both of their offices.

From the distance Jensen had seen before, he'd been mistaken: the trucks hadn’t slammed directly into the building, but had crashed in front of it, sliding into the lobby on their sides. As he looked over the twisted metal, he was able to spot some damage that wasn't part of the crash. But for the most part, the evidence of the fire dog creature double feature had been obscured.

Both of them had decided it would be a bad idea to get outside authorities involved in their investigation, but keeping them out of it was going to take some quick talking. 

Jensen was able to distract the city authorities long enough for Pritchard to covertly collect the internal surveillance information. When he was inevitably asked to pull footage for the departments, there would be no issue with the police or fire department finding something weird on the tapes. And as Pritchard had said, the crash had wiped all the courtyard surveillance, so it wasn’t like the cops were going to get information from anywhere else.

As Pritchard was getting questioned, Jensen excused himself to check the basement for any sign of the fracas he had overheard in the optics lab. The idea of there being living experiments somewhere in the walls of Sarif made his stomach turn, so he hoped that whatever was left of the optics lab would give him some clue as to what had happened.

He was not surprised to find a disaster area downstairs, both the hallway and the lab covered in scorch-marks. There were some odd gouges that looked like large pieces of furniture had been slammed into the wall, but if he had not known there was other fighting going on, he might not have known what he was looking at. It easily looked like the damage could have been caused by a small explosion, if not for the hairline cracks radiating in the opposite direction of the original impacts. They were small, but they were telltale. 

He entered the lab, nose wrinkling in disgust at the smell of burning flesh and plastics melting together. The lab was almost a mirror of the one he had been looking in earlier, though of course, this one was now nearly completely destroyed. Which made the strange closet in the back very noticeable, once he got past the entryway.

As he walked in, the first thing he noticed the smaller room had also been destroyed, but in a way that _felt_ different. While an explosion destroyed the outside lab, the walls inside were melted, almost glass-like, as though some kind of intense heat had scorched the place clean. Jensen's hand traced over the floor, seeing if he could find any imperfections. He could hear that same weird wailing cry from before, when the ooze monster attacked, but as if it was miles away, and a shudder went up his spine.

Yeah, there was _something_ fucked in here, but he couldn’t tell what.

As he stepped out of the closet, he noticed something that looked out of place even in the ruined lab. It was a 4 inch or so square box, sitting at an angle, with what looked like a handle on one side, and some broken-off spikes on the other. He scanned it, but whatever it had done, the explosion had fried whatever was going on in there. He gingerly picked it up by one corner and lifted it, but it seemed pretty inert.

He figured he could pick up a bag from the security station and take it apart later, but he had spent enough time looking at the room for tonight. He wasn’t going to get anything else now.

He took a walk down the hall and back to the guard station, unsurprised to find it empty. He grabbed a bag from under the desk, and made a note to himself to check into the guards who normally patrolled down here. He had a feeling they might be more involved in this than they first appeared. On his way by, he glanced at Dr. Wilson’s lab, but it looked just the same as before: strangely bereft of computers, but perfectly normal.

He rubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. He should make sure Pritchard was faring ok with the authorities. It was nearing three-thirty am and he was ready to fall asleep standing.

Jensen found Pritchard, unsurprisingly, in his office, behind his desk poring over his laptop. 

“Pritchard, I think you should come back to my apartment tonight,” said Jensen, as he looked over the demolished lobby.

“Excuse me?” Pritchard sounded vaguely scandalized. Jensen looked over, confused. “Not that I’m not flattered, Jensen, but I hardly think it’s appropriate…”

“Christ, Pritchard. I’m not ‘asking you over.’ I just thought that with an unknown number of agent provocateurs wandering around, it might be a bad idea to split up. I’m fairly sure my place is closer by, and it’s very late.”

“Oh.” Pritchard looked chagrined. He buried his head back in his laptop and scowled. “You have a point. Give me ten minutes to finish up, then we can go?” 

“Yeah, sounds fine,” said Jensen, fighting a smirk. He sat down on Pritchard’s couch, and looked up at the ceiling. “I mean, not that you aren’t my type, but workplace relationships are a terrible-”

“Is there any amount of money that would get you to drop it?” snapped Pritchard, his face bright red. Jensen laughed and closed his eyes. It seemed like the only logical response.

~~

It ended up being more like a half hour, but Jensen managed a quick power nap, which made the drive back to his apartment safer for the both of them. He wouldn’t have been able to give a detailed report on the trip from Sarif to his apartment, but he could absolutely say that nothing interesting occurred.

As he opened the door for Pritchard, the apartment’s AI said “Welcome home, Mr. Jensen,” and started to open the blinds on the windows to the rapidly lightening morning.

“I take it you haven’t set your apartment off the default settings?” said Pritchard, looking skeptical as he walked into the apartment. “I could help you with that, If you wanted.”

“I don’t feel the need for the apartment to talk to me in most cases, actually, but the welcome message keeps coming back on.” Jensen rearmed the security system. “There are plenty of things that I would have done differently if I had chosen the apartment, trust me.”

“Yeah, Sarif can be really pushy when he decides he wants something his way,” said Pritchard, stepping farther inside. “Do you mind if we hold off on the tour? I’m going to crash out any minute now.”

“Yeah sure.” Jensen tapped into the control screen to close the blinds. “You are more than welcome to the bed, I can sleep here on the couch.”

“What? No, I couldn’t…”

“Look, I made it weird earlier, and I got a nap on your couch.” Jensen lifted the bag with the device in it in his hand, tilting his head towards his desk. “I’m gonna stay up a bit and look at this thing I found in the lab, so you should sleep.”

“Are you sure?” said Pritchard, his eyes sinking closed, looking more zombie than man. Jensen pushed him towards the bedroom, shutting the door behind him, sighing.

Jensen pulled the scorched chunk of metal out of the bag and turned it over a couple of times before setting it on the desk. He spread out his watch repair tools and started to examine the mystery in front of him.

It looked well constructed, but not machine manufactured: even in its post-exploded state he could see the small imperfections that come from hand-building something. The slightly larger clumps of solder in places. The mismatched wires inside, slightly too longer than the intended purpose. All the things that were smoothed out with automation.

As he pulled back the metal plate to look inside, he noticed that one of those slightly too-long wires had come loose from what looked like a transmitter, which was also connected to...a power source? Was it a tiny, fried out EMP? But why?

Part of it had obviously broken off, but it looked like there might have been spikes in it that connected up through the bottom, that also connected to the transmitter and the power, and maybe something else that was missing completely. Without really thinking about it, he took his tweezers and pushed the loose wire down to the terminal to see what would happen.

As the loose wire contacted, a small surge went through the busted machine and a weak charge went through the transmitter, lighting the device up for a moment, before burning it up in a rush, making the whole thing smell like burnt plastic and wires.

“Fuck.” Jensen pulled his hand back as smoke came out of the small box. Setting everything down gently, he pushed back from the desk with a sigh. It was too late to be doing this. He needed to get some sleep. 

He flopped down on the couch, quickly pulling up the security system once more on his HUD. Yep, all the windows and doors were locked, everything seemed fine. Maybe things would make more sense in the morning. Or, realistically, early afternoon.

~~

“Jensen! Jensen, someone broke into your apartment, get up!”

Jensen sat up, only slightly disoriented as the early morning light glared in the windows, Pritchard’s voice coming from his bedroom door. He looked over at the door, his eye shields retracted, brain taking a moment to put together exactly what was going on. His mouth was sticky with morning dryness, his neck stiff from sleeping at an odd angle, but his brain was filling in the gaps of cognition to get him up to speed in record time despite his lack of sleep.

“Jensen, did you hear me?” Pritchard stood in the doorframe, looking entirely too alert for the… _two hours were you kidding me_...of sleep he had gotten before he had yelled Jensen awake. “Why aren’t you more worried?”

“Well, you don’t seem to be bleeding, so I figure the attack can't have been that violent.” Jensen rubbed his face as he got up and walked towards the door. “Now, why do you think there’s been a break in?”

“I don’t _think_ anything, Jensen.” Pritchard crossed his arms, pointing towards the bedroom.

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Ha ha,” said Pritchard, deeply unamused. “Hilarious. Look at this.”

Pritchard pointed to the floor of Jensen’s bedroom, where Pritchard’s bag lay, its contents scattered on the floor. 

“Why am I looking at your dumped out bag?”

“Because I didn’t dump anything out,” said Pritchard, his tone growing more shrill. “I woke up and my bag was like this. And if you were actually looking, you’d notice something large, square, and filled with highly sensitive company data on it is missing!”

“Your laptop is gone?” Jensen glanced around the room, trying to see if it was sitting someplace. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”

“Because I thought some of your ‘detective skills’ would have picked up on the subtle hints of a large laptop missing from a small bag!” said Pritchard, getting more and more irate, pushing past Jensen into the main apartment. 

Jensen felt a chill down his spine, and turned around to look at his desk behind him where the device had been sitting last night.

It was also gone.

_Fuck._

“How in the _hell_ did someone sneak…” Jensen trailed off as he looked up at the window in the bedroom, to the middle wedge of the triangle-shaped pane. If he hadn’t been looking directly at it, he might not have noticed, but in the early morning light he saw the shadow of the impression of where a suction cup had been attached to the glass. “Oh, that _motherfucker._ ”

“Jensen, what are you looking at?” Pritchard glanced up at the window. 

“I think I found the point of entry,” said Jensen, gesturing up at the window. He looked at Pritchard, his arms crossed. “The apartment’s AI didn’t make a peep, and I don’t have any tampering alerts. If I give you full access to the security system, do you think you can figure out why it didn’t set off an alarm when someone broke in?”

“Please, Jensen,” said Pritchard. “This is a Sarif apartment building. I probably wrote most of the code. Stand aside.”

“I’m going to jump in the shower, try and wake up a little.” Jensen pulled his stun gun off of his belt and set it on the desk. “I shouldn’t be long, but just in case, here.”

“You know, any other time I’d say you were being paranoid, but thanks,” said Pritchard, glancing up at the window. 

Jensen walked to the bathroom, grabbing clean clothes on his way. Maybe some hot water would give him some clarity, but he didn’t think so. He was fairly sure it would just make him damp.

~~

There were no revelations found under the hot water, but no disasters, so all-in-all Jensen counted it a wash. He pulled his clothes on, and hung the towel on the back of the door before leaving the bathroom, hoping Pritchard had figured something out.

Pritchard had not moved during the tens of minutes that Jensen had been gone. He was frowning at the computer as Jensen approached the desk, deliberately walking loud enough to be heard.

“So there was a power surge at five-twelve am, which somehow caused the system to reboot,” said Pritchard, starting the explanation without any prompting. This was not an unusual occurrence. “When it rebooted, a dropper slipped in, which opened up a backdoor into the system. When the system did a malware sweep to make sure nothing was out of sorts after the reboot, it took out the first program, but not the backdoor. That explains why the alarm didn’t go off.”

“I will have to take your word for it,” said Jensen.

“However,” Pritchard continued as if Jensen had not spoken, “because of how I set up the camera system, it reboots and rescans on a separate cycle. So, it came back online part of the way through the break in, and backed up its video before going offline again. I don’t have the exit, but I have the entrance. Take a look.”

Pritchard started a video playing, a split screen of the bedroom and the main room. In the bedroom screen, there was a small shadow in the upper triangle of the window, before something pushed against it, and the whole panel moved forward. Someone dressed all in black slipped through the bottom of the triangle and landed on the floor, holding one hand up to their ear. Scanning the room, they spotted Pritchard’s bag and grabbed it.

They lifted it up, and glanced over at the sleeping Pritchard. There was a long moment, where they almost seemed to be weighing a decision, before they overturned the bag and, after looking through the contents now on the floor, grabbed the laptop and slid it into the messenger-bag on their back. 

Next, they walked to the door and listened, before opening the door and creeping Again, the figure scanned the room, until they spotted Jensen’s mystery object. They started to cross the room, then suddenly stopped mid-step, their toe on the ground.

“This is where the system was rescanning,” said Pritchard, sounding irritated. “I’m guessing whoever is in their ear is retaking the alarm and rehacking the system. They hold this way for five minutes.”

Pritchard fast forwarded but the figure didn't move. When they unfroze, the figure straightened, tilted their head back in clear frustration, before cracking their neck, their wrists, and their fingers, and moving on. Jensen snorted. He could relate.

The figure then moved past the couch, with a slight glance over Jensen’s sleeping form. They didn’t seem to see anything worrisome, because they didn’t pause before going to the desk, picking up the device and unceremoniously shoving it in their bag. 

When they turned around, something had apparently changed, because they crouched low as they looked at the couch, hands in a defensive position. In the low light of morning, their hands began to glow.

Well, that dispelled the question of who they were, unless there were more ninja mages running around. Though Jensen supposed given the last twenty four hours he shouldn’t discount the possibility, but he really wanted to.

Probably fortunately for the apartment’s inhabitants, whatever spooked the mage passed, and his hands stopped glowing. He carefully traversed the room, until he got just behind the couch, and his head tilted, like he was listening to something. Suddenly, he looked directly at the camera and waved before the video went to static. Shortly after, the feed in the bedroom went to static as well.

“I take it that’s all?” Jensen rubbed his forehead. 

“Isn’t that enough?” Pritchard pushed away from the desk in frustration. “With access on the laptop, they can easily get into Sarif’s internal networks and fuck up whatever they want. We have to get it back.”

“I don’t disagree, Pritchard, but I don’t know where to even start.”

“Good thing you don’t have to,” said Pritchard, standing up with a look of determination. “I’ve reached the limit of what I can do on this machine, and Sarif is obviously compromised. I’m going to head back to my place and go on the offensive. Because even though they got my laptop, they didn’t get _this_.”

Pritchard pulled out a small thumbdrive like it was independently significant. Jensen waited for more explanation.

“Things were going sideways last night, so I backed up some key files.” Pritchard scowled as he pocketed the drive, crossing to gather his things back in his bag. “And, it’s clear that the hacker did not have as much time to cover their tracks. I was able to pick up forensic information that I’ll be able to use to do some trace back, once I have better tech.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it under control,” said Jensen, looking around with a frown. “I can give you a ride, if you want. I’m not sure Sarif is the best place to go back to right now, but I think it might not be a bad idea to check out the museum and see what kind of information I can find about those notes I found.”

“I can’t think of anything better.” Pritchard sounded disappointed. He started towards the front door with a shrug. “I mean, we are enough in the dark that anything to get us information has to be worth something.”

“Not exactly a vote of confidence,” said Jensen, looking around the apartment, feeling disquieted in a real way at someone just walking through while he slept. “I realize it's a long shot, but I have to try.”

“I know it’s hard when people aren’t just lining up to be punched, but I’m sure if we keep digging we will get you back in your groove eventually.”

“Your faith in me is astounding.”

“Anytime, Jensen. Anytime.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will have some inter-team conflict, during the daytime! Get ready for snark on snark action!
> 
> I would love to hear feedback, if'n you are enjoying yourself!


	6. I Make Such A Good Statistic Someone Should Study Me Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jensen goes to the library to see if he can find some information on what he found in the basement of Sarif Industries, but he ends up finding someone he was not expecting.

It was entirely too bright for how much of last night he'd spent on high alert. Thankfully for Jensen’s general level of awakeness, Pritchard had insisted on stopping for breakfast on the way to his apartment, having a feeling it would be a long day ahead. While the reheated breakfast sandwiches from the coffee joint weren’t anything to write home about, the exceedingly strong coffee was doing a lot to fill the gaps that were left by the lack of sleep from last night.

The campus of the local college was not a place he would say he blended in, but the kinds of information he needed seemed likely to be found only in books, so some sacrifices in dignity had to be made. 

He had first driven to the museum, only to find that thanks to the new exhibit, the wing he required was closed. After some frustrated lateral thinking he had an idea that could get him the information he was looking for. A quick conversation with Pritchard to determine exactly which building he should be going to led him across a college campus a half hour later.

Jensen walked into the Wayne State adjunct library, feeling weirdly nostalgic for days gone by, ready to see what he could find out about this mystery book. There wasn't really a place that smelled quite like a university library, being filled with old books that sat so much of their lives in isolation, hiding pieces of esoterica behind thick leather bindings and numbers and dots whose classification hadn't needed to be updated in hundreds of years.

Just inside the entryway to the library, in between the librarian's desk and the rest of the stacks, there was something that could only be an ancient metal detector. 

That...might be a problem.

"Can I help you?" asked a friendly, but slightly wary voice from behind the end of the library desk. He turned to look at a short woman behind the counter, looking up behind a stack of books nearly her own height. She was wearing an oversized cardigan with what seemed overly stereotypical glasses on a metal chain around her neck. She squinted up at him and tilted her head when he did not come any farther into the building. "Are you looking for something in specific?"

Jensen smiled, glad the bright light from the outside made his eye shields seem normal. He held up the book he had grabbed from Dr. Wilson’s shipment. 

“Hi, I’m hoping you can help me.” Jensen tried to lean into any bit of non-threatening energy he could put out. Happily, she seemed to relax as he engaged with her. “I’m supposed to be helping a corporate research consultant on an adjunct project with the university and the museum, and I’m feeling a little out of my depth.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, still sounding a little reserved. “How can I help you with that?”

“You see,” he held up the book, “she has me running errands around the exhibits all week, but she really hasn’t given me much to work with, background wise. All I have is this book, and I’m hoping I can get some other background information so she stops treating me like quite so much of a country bumpkin. Could you point me in the right direction?”

“Well, I’m happy to see what I can do.” The woman took the book, opening it to the first page. She looked at the text and pursed her lips to the side. After a moment she lifted her eyebrows and smiled, setting the book down on the counter. “Well, sir, you might be in luck!”

“Why’s that?” said Jensen, trying to keep his tone light. Surprises weren’t really something he needed today.

“I think this might be what Professor Crane is working with upstairs.” She took a piece of paper and wrote down a list of things. “If you take the stairs up to the fourth floor, histories and antiquities are up there. Let me give you some call numbers to look under. Have you researched in a university library before?”

“It’s been a while, but yeah,” said Jensen, trying to look sincere. From the reaction of the librarian, it seems like he was succeeding. “Uh, about the arches. I know they used to just go off for metal, or magnets? I don’t want to make a fuss, but...” he waved his arm out to show his hand. 

“Oh!” she said, looking embarrassed and apologetic, rolling up her sleeve to show the unmistakable sign of an artificial wrist. “They don’t react to anything they aren’t calibrated to. It’s mostly so kids don’t run off with the laptops. Also, there’s nothing on the fourth floor. It’s just books up there. Here you go!”

“Great.” He took back the book with a note tucked in the front cover and gave a grateful nod. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem!” She waved a little, smiling warmly. “If you need anything else, I’ll be right down here! Really, anything!”

“I’ll...keep that in mind,” he said, walking toward the stairs.

Each landing of the stairwell had bulletin boards that were covered in various levels of school-based advertisements. The first floor was absolutely packed with them, with everything from posters for student org activities, to recruitment for scientific experimentation, all the way to catchy slogans for upcoming sports games. As the floors got higher, fewer posters remained. By the fourth floor there was just the reminder that no open food or drinks were allowed in the library, an ad for a gender blind production of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ being produced by the university’s theater company at the end of the month, and a handwritten poster recruiting for a ‘natural human appreciation society’.

Lovely.

Jensen opened the doors to the fourth floor of the library and was struck by just how quiet it was. Not just the stereotypical silence of a library, but the more unique silence of any building that seemed more and more outside of time. It was rare, especially in this day and age surrounded by screens and electronics, the particular muffled soundscape of a room filled with old books. It smelled like recycled air and, unsurprisingly, books.

The lights had the strange uneven quality of brightness where he stood, then deep shadow, then a lighter patch farther away. There weren’t even study rooms at this level. It was uniquely academic at this point. 

Jensen looked down at the note given to him by the kind librarian. It started with “around BL 660-2680, probably BL 1500-1590, maybe D51-90?” and then, scribbled at the bottom was a name and a phone number. 

Jensen shook his head. He was pretty sure that he wouldn't find any information about the book with that last bit, but stranger things had happened. This weekend even.

He walked through the shelves, vaguely curious about the professor who was supposedly working up here. He heard the sound of pencil on paper from the far side of the floor, and made his way over. If he didn’t need to go digging through a bunch of books to find out more information, that would be incredibly useful. On the other hand, it was looking more and more that Dr. Wilson was not working alone, so if he stumbled on another conspirator that could also have value. 

“Do you need anything else, Professor Crane?” said a voice, speaking in the heavy whisper that seemed so natural in a library. “I can check back with you after I get the freshmen settled in with their research assignments on the second floor.”

“No, I’m fine Jeremy,” said a weirdly familiar male voice. “You’ve done more than enough. I’m perfectly capable of finding what I need. But if you want to talk more about grad school, sure, come find me.”

No. It couldn’t be. 

Jensen made himself busy as Jeremy walked past, toward the stairs to set up that research session. Jensen peeked around the corner to see the now-familiar form of a certain white-haired nuisance. He was sitting at a table, familiar symbols and circles spread out in front of him, a couple dozen books in various states of research spread on the table. It looked like he had been there a while, a tweed-patterned coat draped over the back of the chair, a bulky sweatshirt instead of his typical black ninja gear. Not what Jensen would call a complex disguise, but then, Jensen had been stabbed by this guy, so maybe his ability to ID the ‘professor’ was a little higher than most.

Jensen weighed his options as he watched the professor. He might be able to get the jump on him since he was distracted, but it seemed like a bad idea. For one thing, they were in a building filled with civilians. For another, as Jensen watched, he saw something that shuggested a more conversation-based solution could be open to him: the man put down his pencil, rubbed his eyes, and grumbled quietly to himself. 

“Why couldn’t they get really into sacred geometry like normal crazy people. That’s easy to deal with.” He muttered softly enough that Jensen's enhanced hearing could barely discern it, putting his head in his hands and lacing his fingers through his hair, obviously lost in a moment of frustrated distraction.

That was enough to make up Jensen’s mind. He stepped out of the stacks, his hands in front of him to show he meant no harm.

“Professor Crane, I presume.” Jensen stifled a smirk as the other man started, looking up at Jensen through his eyebrows with large, horrified eyes. He stayed frozen, waiting to see what Jensen was going to do. Jensen kept his hands far apart, moving slowly and carefully towards the table, watchful for whatever the professor’s next move would be. 

With a groan, the other man placed his hands in the air, and put his face on the table with a thump.

“You know what?” he said, directly into the table. “I don’t care. I’ve been awake for days, and I’m out of bandwidth to run interference on this right now. I’m fairly sure you’re not here to kill me, why don’t you sit down and tell me what you want?” 

Jensen sat down, keeping his hands out in the open, as the other man tilted his head up to watch him sit, also keeping his hands on the table, palms down. 

“Adam Jensen, right?” said the other man, his eyes exhausted, his tone exasperated. “So, what got you here? The museum’s crate? Something in Dr. Wilson’s lab? Blind stupid luck?”

“I’m actually not bad at a little detective work. I’m following up something from Dr. Wilson’s lab.” Jensen pointed to his coat and Dr. Wilson’s notes, but didn't reach for it. Things were still a little too tense for reaching for things in pockets. “What can I call you? I assume Professor Crane isn’t actually your name.”

“I would really prefer to keep names out of this for now,” said the professor, baring his teeth in a mockery of a smile as he sat up. “Not that I don’t trust you, but I’m not an idiot _and_ I don’t trust you.”

“Don’t people in your line of work have nicknames they use?” asked Jensen, tilting his head. “I can always use that.”

“Yeah, they never really stuck,” said the other man, looking incredibly put-upon. It seemed like this might have come up before. “Felt too much like a hacker handle, I think. Some groups insist on using them anyway. I usually get around that by not talking to people a second time.”

“Well, you’ve messed that up pretty spectacularly,” said Jensen. The professor looked at him in confusion. “I think this is the third time we’ve exchanged words.”

“About exchanging things,” said the professor. “Let’s circle back to whatever you have of Dr. Wilson’s. I don’t suppose you’d just give me whatever you found in the lab, would you?”

“Would _you_ like to tell _me_ what’s going on without having to argue every inch of information along the way?”

“Oh, absolutely,” said the professor. “Because I’m sure you will be able to handle it all on your own. It wouldn’t land you in my way, killed, or killed getting in my way.”

“Because you have so many more fire dogs?”

“Fire dogs?” The professor's eyebrows knit in confusion before recognition dawned on his face. “Oh, that’s what they went with. Huh. Would not have been my choice, but wasn’t my call. Yeah, we have more resources to deal with this.”

“Well, I guess since you’re already doing so well, you don’t need this,” said Jensen, slowly and carefully pulling out Dr. Wilson’s book. He then opened the book, pulled out one page of Dr. Wilson’s notes that were folded in the back, and turned towards the professor. The professor’s eyes narrowed and his hands flexed on the table, body language changing as the paper came out. “Or maybe you don’t have as many resources as you thought.”

“You don’t know what you have there.” The professor pushed himself back from the table. He was keeping his hands in the open, but his demeanor had turned entirely less cordial. “Give that to me. Please.”

“I can tell that please was hard for you,” said Jensen, activating his HUD in anticipation of things getting interesting. “But why don’t we just sitting down and continue our civil conversation.”

“You stay where I can see you, or I swear, I will fry your eyes out of your skull,” snarled the professor, staying the arms length away he had pushed himself from the table. “And if I see your hand move towards your weapons, I will not hesitate to burn this building down.”

“That seems a little _extreme_ ,” said Jensen, trying to scan the situation for any advantage. He was, unsurprisingly, sensing a lot of aggression from the other side of the table. “Wouldn’t that ruin your research?”

“I haven't even approached extremes,” said the professor. “I now know they are using hybrid bind runes, which explains a lot of somethings that didn’t make sense before, and doesn’t make sense to you now, so fuck it. I’m sure I can get enough information off the notes before this whole place goes up. Try me.”

The two of them stared at each other, glaring over the table, waiting for the other person to move.

“Jensen! Where are you?” came Pritchard over the Infolink. “Jensen, I’ve got great news.”

“Little busy here, Pritchard,” subvocalized Jensen, keeping his eyes locked on the hair trigger locked and loaded across the table from him. The professor’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t move. 

“Well, when you’re free, the hacker from the group that broke in here got in touch with me, and it turns out we are not at cross purposes. We’ve decided to pool resources.”

“Oh, you have?” he said, feeling a smile form on his face. The professor’s fingers twitched, as Pritchard continued in his ear, not hesitating.

“Yes! She told me that one of their group was there doing research. She said you’d probably recognize him, and he hasn’t been answering his comm.”

“Oh, he hasn’t has he?” raising his eyebrows. “Hasn’t been picking up his comms?”

“...are you talking to him right now?”

“Yes, Pritchard.”

“Oh! She said ‘tell Aelif that Iris said put your damn earpiece back in you stupid sparkplug.’” 

“Happily,” said Jensen. He smiled at the professor and spoke out loud. “Uh, Aelif, was it? Iris said put your damn earpiece back in 'you stupid sparkplug.’”

Aelif reached up and touched his ear, and blanched. He reached into his coat, turning his back on Jensen to dig through it. He pulled out a box with symbols engraved on it, opened it, grabbed something from inside and pushed it into his ear. He tapped it a couple of times, then winced, obviously now getting an earful of something. 

Jensen heard a little bit of “yes, and-” “look, I forgot-” before the other man walked away, shooting a glare his way.

Jensen sat on the edge of the table, waiting for Aelif to finish the conversation with his hacker as Pritchard continued.

“So, the other guy you’ll probably be talking to is Johnny Rocket,” said Pritchard. “I’ll check with CatzEye, the hacker, if there’s some place to meet up.”

“I think I’ll have some things to discuss here,” said Jensen. “I can’t imagine our ninja friend is going to just leave his research. I’ll check in with you when I’m done.”

“Is that the asshole who took my laptop?” asked Pritchard, his tone growing irate. “It is, isn’t it. Take something from him for me. Something annoying that he’ll miss.” 

“I’ll be sure to do that, Pritchard.” Jensen took a closer look at the papers on the table. They were no more comprehensible than the stuff in Dr. Wilson’s office. “I haven’t been stabbed yet today, seems like a great plan. Jensen out.”

Aelif came back, his face set in a scowl, his hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. He looked up at Jensen, the extreme menace from before diffused somewhat as he walked with a restrained step. He arrived at the table, placed his hands on the flat surface, and took a deep breath. 

“So.” Aelif stared resolutely at the papers between them, his hands spread out in a clear attempt to be non threatening. “I have been made to understand we are now working together, and have been advised to perhaps be a little less hostile. In the spirit of cooperation, what questions do you have?”

Jensen stood for a moment, watched, and considered. He could let this sit and stew, but for the longevity of the partnership, he felt that waiting was probably not in his long-term best interest. 

Instead, he reached back into the book and pulled out the rest of Dr. Wilson's pages, placing them in front of Aelif to display all of the doctor's scribbles and diagrams. He was rewarded with a bitter laugh, with maybe a slight tinge of hysteria, as Aelif looked up through his eyebrows, eyes incredulous as he shook his head.

“Ok, pull up a chair,” said Aelif, pushing some papers around. “I can bring you up to speed on the absolutely batshit craziness that has been happening in your basement.”

“Is this really the best place to be talking?” asked Jensen, looking around the relatively open space of the library. 

“Yeah, it’s fine.” Aelif waved his hand dismissively. He pointed at a square box in the middle of the table, with a couple of lights on top of it. It was silver with winding silver script on it, and had a copper braid around the base. “I set up a whisper charm. It will let me know if someone is actively listening or watching, and short out any low level bugs in range. Problem is, it also fries my earpiece, depending on what comes by.”

Jensen nodded like any of what Aelif said made sense. He must have faked it well enough, because Aelif continued.

“Right. So, as you hopefully know, Dr. Meredith Wilson is not actually a pharmacological wunderkin, but has in fact been scamming your company for its access to clinical trials,” said Aelif, peering expectantly at Jensen. 

“Yes, we have figured that out.” Jensen's tone was dry enough to make jerky, but Aelif ignored it and kept going.

“What probably hasn’t been clear is she has been doing similar things for years, along with a group of like-minded individuals. We think she targeted Sarif because with its focus on human augmentation, it uses a lot of human test subjects. She had a pretext to get her hands on what she was after: unfettered access to blood and suffering.”

“So that’s come up a couple of times now. Why would anyone _need_ blood and suffering?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re like most people who grew up around here, you have a weird blind spot regarding magic?” Aelif glanced over with a mix of curiosity and disgust on his face. When Jensen nodded, he rolled his eyes. “What the hell is with this town? Is it the blood magic? The water? The mass augmentation? I know people who would love to study it, but they would absolutely get murdered trying.”

“I think you might be getting off topic,” said Jensen. “Unless exactly how ignorant people from Detroit are is key to understanding the last couple of days. They, by all means, get it out of your system.”

“It’s not ignorance. It’s weirder than that. Magic is not abnormal outside of this town, but this library contains none of the basic texts I’d expect to find. You’re the head of security for a major corporation, and I walked into your building without meeting a single magical countermeasure until I got near Dr. Wilson’s workroom. But you don't _seem_ blindingly incompetent.”

Jensen didn’t think that merited a response. It wouldn’t be a civil one in any case.

“It’s like...something about the area suppresses the ability of people to recognize magic. But you’re right, I need to get a lot of information in quickly, so I’m going to stop adding detail. You have a blood magic cult. It’s trying to raise a big powerful entity, one might call it a god. It might destroy the world.”

“You overshot the mark a bit,” said Jensen. “I think I'm going to need a _little_ more detail than that.”

“Yeah, thought that might be too much.” Aelif pulled out notes with more words and fewer drawings. “So, Dr. Wilson and associates are blood mages, and long story short, everyone fucking hates them. Blood magic is terrible: by causing pain and ending life, it raises magical energy, and that warps the world around it. Which does some really fucked up things to the astral plane if you keep at it over long periods of time.”

“Astral plane?”

“It’s an invisible dimension overlapping but not coterminous with ours, where spirits and other magical creatures live,” said Aelif, taking a blank piece of paper, and drawing a picture of two flat surfaces, one right over the other. “Magical things exist on both planes, spirits can manifest on this one, people's consciousnesses can travel to the astral, things that happen on one affect the other, but not always in direct ways. Got it?”

“Not really, but keep going.”

“Great.” Aelif added to the drawing with the top surface ‘leaking’ into the bottom, like drops of water on a window. “If a blood mage is doing magic, it warps the astral plane, and starts letting even more terrible things in, like death spirits, corruption entities. Things like that goo monster in your lobby.”

“So, when Pritchard said it felt like it was sucking the life out of him…”

“It absolutely was,” said Aelif, utterly serious. “And you, especially, need to be careful about that. Blood spirits, death spirits, they cut through people with augmentations, because they can devour a person’s essence, or your biological energy first. They will stop your heart in your chest if you aren’t paying attention.”

Jensen felt a retroactive chill as he remembered how close some of those tendrils had gotten, how pale and shaky Pritchard had looked with only a brush from one. 

“Yes, exactly. Exactly as bad as you are thinking. And it would hurt the whole time you died,” said Aelif, grabbing a book from the bottom of the stack and flipping to the middle section, where the glossy pages were. He opened it to a double page spread of cave paintings, all showing what looked like petroglyphs of people being attacked by red lightning, devoured by ghosts, and then killed by dozens of other people with spears. 

“We don’t have time for a philosophical lesson, but you can imagine why blood mages work alone and in secret,” said Aelif. “You use blood magic? You die. Either from fucking up, or someone finding out and killing you. The very idea of a group of people working together and doing this over a long period of time, cooperating in secret? Unthinkable. No one believed it.”

“So why are you here?” said Jensen. “Seems like you’re a small group to be going after something this big. No offense.”

“Well, someone with more money and power than sense hired us to come here, by greatly under selling exactly how bad the situation was,” said Aelif. “We thought this was a group of two, maybe three mages working together, and that was scary enough. We have at least ten at this point, and they’ve been seeding the land with darkness to bring something terrible out of the ground. Which brings us back to Dr. Wilson’s work.”

“And her diagrams?”

“Yes, her diagrams. They help us figure out a purpose to all this. You see, big magic rituals are usually done over a long period of time, because you need to feed them slowly, carefully. Maintaining the kind of focus you need to keep it going is impossible.” Aelif pulled out some papers, lining them up on the table alongside Jensen's contributions. “So, you start small. You do a little magic, and keep it stable, and let it grow in power. Then you connect it to another bit of magic, and let it stabilize.”

“Why wouldn’t you do it all at once?”

“Two reasons. One, you don’t have the magical talent available. Ten mages is a lot, but you might need up to a hundred to get this going to get this going faster. So you do something more technically difficult and costly, but in the long run it will be stable and reliable.”

“Like a battery, instead of a lightning strike.”

“Exactly! Yeah, that’s a good way to put it, actually.” Aelif looked surprised. “A mage just pouring power into the system is more chaotic, easier to change, but you don’t know how long it will last. And then, second, it’s a lot easier to stop something when it’s all happening at once.”

“How is that?”

“We can find pieces of the big picture, but without the blueprint, we can’t mullify it completely,” said Aelif, bitterly. “We’ve found small amplification devices in the area, but we aren’t even sure they are part of this ritual. They might just be part of an early warning system to let the fucking cult know it’s been made. They are far better prepared than they have any right to be.”

“You sound pretty mad for someone who makes their living sneaking in and stealing things from people’s unsuspecting apartments.”

“Well, excuse me if I’m angry that a _murder cult_ trying to use blood and death to bring back a sleeping god somehow got advance knowledge we flew in from across the country to stop them!” Aelif shut the book with an angry thump. “Once we figured out that they were using ritual items to stage a long-term hermetic ritual, we made a run for Dr. Wilson’s research. We had some intel on ritual sites, so we had some things mapped out, but we needed anything on what their future plans looked like, so we risked getting more noticed. Which led us to diverting the crate and also breaking into Sarif HQ.”

“Ok,” said Jensen. “I have some idea of where we are now.”

“Well, you weren’t supposed to.” Aelif scowled again. “Something tipped your hacker off and tangled you up in this. When did you get these from Dr. Wilson, anyway?”

“Right after I got back from the warehouse,” said Jensen.

“Well, congratulations.” Aelif looked at the last bits of paper, nodding and writing a couple of notes down. He looked like he had an outline of some kind that he was working off of, but Jensen couldn’t quite read what it said from this angle. “I think you got these while I was finding that Wilson had people in magical stasis under the basement. She was very angry at me when I fucked up her system.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” said Jensen. “How does that even work?”

“I’m actually glad I don’t know,” said Aelif. “She had a person forever bleeding embedded in the wall about twenty feet away from her workshop, down the hall from her lab. I tried to stab and run, but Wilson got there before I could do much. I don’t know if you caught any footage. Iris found some camera redundancies down there.”

“I think Dr. Wilson cleaned it out after you left.” Jensen shook his head. “The place was melted to glass. Pritchard is still pissed about his laptop, by the way.” 

“Let him be, we needed the information. Apparently the firewall was too morphic to reliably break through.” Aelif sounding like he was mad about it, like he might have gotten outvoted in a group decision. “It was easier for me to sneak past the two of you than for our very, very skilled hacker to strip the information at a distance. Your friend should take it as a compliment. You shouldn’t, but he should.”

“Hey!” said Jensen, fully offended.

“I’m just stating facts,” Aelif gathered up all his papers and spread Dr. Wilson’s notes back out on the table. “It took me less than five minutes to open your skylight, and if we'd been a little less concerned about frying your whole system, I could have taken your network out in five more. For a security person, your place is woefully unsecure. But that should bring us up to today. Any questions?”

“Just one,” said Jensen. “What is your problem?”

“I’m sorry?” asked Aelif, seeming sincerely confused. 

“While I can’t say you haven’t explained what’s happening, you’ve gone out of your way to be insulting at every turn. Is it personal? Are you trying to get a rise out of me? Are you just an asshole?”

Aelif stared at him, mouth open slightly, when the box in the middle of the table flashed bright blue. 

“Hold that thought.” Aelif raised a finger to his lips, then pointed towards the stairs. After a moment, around the corner walked Jeremy, the library research assistant. His face took on an ugly cast when he spotted Jensen, and he came over to stand by the table, face set in a stern glare.

“Professor, is this man bothering you?” Jeremy sneared down his nose at Jensen, making a point to look disdainfully at Jensen’s black hands before dismissing him. Jensen wondered how many meetings of the ‘natural human appreciation society’ the brat had been to.

“No, Jeremy,” said Aelif, his tone far softer than it had been moments before. He gestured at a pile of books on the side of the table. “But I have finished with these. If it’s not too much trouble, can you help me put them away?”

“Oh, of course, sir!” said Jeremy, moving past Jensen to collect to the pile of books. As he passed by again, he ran into Jensen, ‘accidentally’ hitting the back of Jensen’s head with the corner of a book. “Watch it, hanzer.”

“Young man!” said Aelif, as Jensen’s hand flew to the back of his head, less from the pain of the blow than from surprise. Aelif was standing, glaring furiously at the student. “I better not have heard what I think I just heard.”

“Huh?” said Jeremy, in the voice of a boy unused to facing repercussions for his actions. Jensen tilted his head to look up Aelif, unsure of what was going on. Aelif, for his part, remained focused on Jeremy, eyes furious.

“Put those down and apologize to my colleague immediately,” Aelif said, his voice icy and quiet, but also authoritative and stern. It wasn’t a murderous type of scary, but ‘Professor Crane’ had his own kind of intimidation going on. 

“I..I’m sorry...sir.” Jeremy put the books down, looking at Jensen with his most pathetic expression. It probably worked on most people, but at the moment, it just made Jensen tired. “I didn’t know you worked with Professor Crane.”

“It. Shouldn’t. Matter,” said Aelif, each word bitten off, having stood up to catch Jeremy’s eyes, holding them laser-like in his fury. “That is no way for a person of academic bearing to act, let alone one who is looking to study the magical arts.”

“Of course, sir….”

“If you can’t see other people as people,” said Aelif, crossing behind Jensen and closing in on the student in a menacing stride, “then you aren’t the kind of person who should be delving into matters of the beyond, no matter how clever you think you might be. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” Jeremy backed away, shaking his head. “Sorry, sir.”

“You understand that plenty of people see the awakened as less than human?” Aelif continued, his voice still the quiet menace that fit the technical noise limits of a library, but carried all the threat of a bellow. “That people see elves as less than humans? That it just takes one hate campaign from people with power to ensure that you and the people you love are seen as less worthy? Less than a person?”

“Sorry, sir,” Jeremy repeated, his eyes filling with tears. ”I didn’t mean it sir.”

“If you didn’t mean it, that’s worse!” Aelif threw his hands into the air in disgust. “Just parrorting things you’ve been told are true without thinking about it? Get out of my sight, and think about the kind of person you are presenting yourself to be. In the study of magic, petty hatreds will get you killed _at best_. There are worse things than merely dying.”

“Of course, sir. Sorry, sir.” Jeremy turned tail to leave. Aelif stood and stared after him, like a hawk watching a mouse scurry through a field, deciding it wasn’t worth the energy to swoop down for the kill.

Aelif turned around, mouth set in a hard line. He glanced up at Jensen, then back down at the books stacked in the corner. He rubbed his eyes, and picked up the books, waving his hand at the table with the paper still on it. 

“Probably just an asshole,” he said, scanning the library, hunching his shoulders a little as though picking up something heavier than the books. “I should put these back. Apparently Johnny’s on his way to make a more formal introduction. You want to take a look at what is here, see if you spot anything out of place?”

“I can help with the books,” said Jensen. “It will go much faster with two of us, and I’m not really sure I’m going to see anything on my own.”

“Feels like this is a mess I should take care of myself,” said Aelif, glancing down at the call numbers. He shrugged and held out some of the books to Jensen. “But apparently I’m making _great_ calls today, so I’ll defer to you.”

“Are you sure you can trust me with the full magnitude of the responsibility?” Jensen grabbed the books, his voice gravelly and serious, without betraying an ounce of humor.

Aelif looked over at him questioningly, before rolling his eyes. 

“I don’t know,” said Aelif. “All those big words might be daunting for you. How about you meet me back here if you need help sounding any others out. I’m sure we can get through this together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who doesn't love a little barely contained fury over books, right? 
> 
> The two groups are merging, but that doesn't mean things are getting easier. Next up, figuring out their next plan of attack, but there are things happening in the shadows that no one is expecting.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	7. We Don't Say Everything That We Could

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that the out-of-towners are working with some people from the inside, it's time to make some plans.

True to prediction, no one interrupted Jensen and Aelif as they shared what little common knowledge they possessed .

Unfortunately, it turned out most of it was patchy at best.

“I can’t say our complete lack of conclusions on this whole business is very comforting,” said Jensen, glancing back through Dr. Wilson’s notes to see if anything made sense. Something about the handwriting that looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

“I’ve never been accused of being comforting.” Aelif looked grimly at the sparse facts in front of them. “But you aren’t wrong. I’d already hit a wall when you arrived. Blood mages don’t leave a lot of history behind anyway, so it was a long shot, but it was the only one we had.”

“So, how are these notes going to help?”

“They provide actual, real information about what their processes really are.” Aelif gestured to the pages of overlapping and contradictory notes. “We don’t actually need to know all the details of how to do what they are doing. We just need to know enough to interfere . The bar is way lower to break something than to fix it, as long as we can figure out what and where it's going to happen.”

“Seems straightforward enough, except _what_ and _where_ are pretty big items of information,” said Jensen. “Are you even sure you’re here at the right time?”

“It has to be soon.” Aelif pulled out a couple of notes from a yellow note pad. “There’s a reference in an email we found about having to get it done before the end of this moon cycle, or they’d have to wait another two years. And since they are actively moving and things are starting to ramp up, we know they are trying to do it now. That means we have a two week window.”

“Ok, that’s something.” 

“Yeah. The thing I found under Sarif had some markings that referenced water, maybe a river? So it’s likely the site is someplace along the river. But the spell might also just have a water feature. It wasn’t super clear. We have someone checking a likely location now.”

“Good to know we’re looking for something specific,” Jensen muttered wryly.

“Hey, let’s see how well you read a symbolic language when someone is tearing apart a room looking for you.” Aelif handed Jensen a book he had pulled from the stacks. “While I’ve studied ritual magic, I don’t perform a lot of it. Sometimes the language isn’t as literal as you would hope. Here. I found an intro to magic text that isn’t aimed at kids. Hopefully it will stick. ”

“Thanks.” Jensen took the book with a sceptical expression. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but are you sure I can’t help?”

“Can you read medieval italian?” asked Aelif, looking up at Jensen, expression neutral.

“No.”

“Do you know the alchemical symbols used by Newton?”

“Again, no.”

“How about Agrripa’s Celestial Alphabet? Elder Futhark?”

“Isn’t that last one Norse runes?”

“Everyone does love a viking,” said Aelif, as he went back to a diagram that looked hand-written. “As much as I’m sure you’d be _very_ helpful, I don’t think I can cram years of study into a half hour.”

“So, is the professor thing more of a cover story?”

“It’s cute you think I’m going to answer that. Feel free to keep asking though, I’ll be distracted enough soon,” said Aelif, writing a set of symbols down without looking up. He gnawed on his lip and tapped his pencil on the paper. “Actually, this is going to sound like a weird question, but where did you say you found these notes?”

“Dr. Wilson’s lab.” Jensen leaned over to look at which page Aelif was on. He had Dr. Wilson's notes laid out in a square, with some blank pages as spacers in between, like he was trying to map out a pattern. “But there wasn’t anything written around them that seemed significant.”

“Was there anything strange about the room?”

“Actually, yeah. Now that you mention it, it was all set up to look like a functional lab, but none of the electronics were plugged in.”

“Really?” Aelif tapped his pencil on the paper and furrowed his brow. He held out the pencil to Jensen, and gestured to the paper in front of him. “Could you sketch out the room for me? I need some directional information.”

“Sure.” Jensen walked around to the mage's right, taking the pencil and drawing the lab. “It was pretty standard, just very sterile and staged.”

“Ok,” said Aelif, closing his eyes in concentration. “So, the notes were kept on the wall that was closest to the hidden workshop, which would have put it in the zone of heavy interference. Which means…”

Aelif trailed off and drummed his fingers against his forehead, before opening his eyes again and tapping the opposite wall.

“Do you know what’s over here?”

“Let me pull up a map,” said Jensen, connecting to Sarif’s internal network and accessing the lab layout section of blueprints in his HUD. “It looks like it’s just a bunch of power and water conduits, then a small storage room, then a staircase.”

“Hmm.” Aelif grabbed back the pencil and sketched some symbols, muttering as he made some calculations on the side. He seemed to get lost in thought as he stared at the paper, tapping the pencil repeatedly on the corner of the room.

As they looked at the paper, the box in the middle of the table started to pulse a rapid white light, like a signal on the top of a radio tower. Aelif looked at it with a puzzled expression, and reached towards it. Suddenly, it flared with a bright white flash, and a squealing came from Aelif’s ear.

“Fuck!” said Aelif, slapping the side of his head.

“Problem?”

“Shitty, fucking piece of-” Aelif took out his earpiece, which looked a little scorched. He threw it on the table, put his hand back up to the side of his head, and started to gather up notes. “The stupid thing fried. Can’t be sure the place is secure, so time to pack up. Johnny should be here any time now.”

“Are you ok? I think you’re bleeding,” said Jensen, reaching forward to help. Aelif’s eyes widened, and he slapped Jensen’s hand back. 

“I’m fine,” said Aelif, standing up with a start, seeming to only now realise how close the other man was. “Why don’t you head down first. I can clean up here. There’s something I need to check.”

“O...kay,” said Jensen. “You realize how suspicious that is, right?”

“There’s nothing-” Aelif clenched his jaw as he bit something back. He gripped his side, and narrowed his eyes. “I just need a moment. Take the notes. Call your hacker lifeline. I don’t care, just do it from farther away from me.”

With that, Aelif turned from the table and disappeared into the stacks, away from the stairs, leaving Jensen confused and alone.

“Jensen, where are you?” Pritchard’s voice popped in over the infolink. “No one can get a hold of your study buddy. Did something happen?”

“Hard to say,” said Jensen, as he gathered both Aelif’s and Dr. Wilson’s notes from the table. He left the books, not sure what the mage wanted to keep. “We had a communication mishap here. Do you know if their secondary group has made it to the library?”

“Yeah, they’ve been waiting for a while now,” said Pritchard. “CatzEye called me because you two were no-shows. Did you steal me something?”

“In an effort to not cause an incident, no.” Jensen kept an eye out for library attendants as he hurried down the stairs. “But I do have some interesting notes. What do you know about the power and water conduits in Sarif's basement?”

“...what were you researching again?”

“Can you dig into the schematics down there? I have a feeling it’s going to be important.”

“Well, if you think it’s going to be important, I can look into it,” said Pritchard. “I don’t know if CatzEye will be there, but someone named Johnny Rocket should be waiting someplace outside the library. I’m guessing you’ll recognize him from the rooftop before.”

“Thanks, Pritchard. I’ll check in later. Jensen out.”

~~

Johnny Rocket was waiting by a mid-priced sedan, getting a deeper and deeper pit in his stomach at the radio silence from his mage in the library.

“I’m seeing if I can get any eyes inside,” said Iris from the back seat. She typed into a keyboard on her lap, eyes staring into space, reading the air in front of her. Her head was half shaved, half bright green, and she looked dressed to get dropped off at a club rather than at whatever straight-laced detective convention Johnny was planning on swinging by.

True, Johnny looked far more like he stepped out of an old-time crime novel, but his long, tan trench coat, frumpy brown suit and a wide brimmed hat really put skittish clients at ease, both in the shadows and out. And while their mixed doubles of heavily wired street urchin and hard-boiled private dick might seem incongruous, stranger looks were out there.

Johnny lit a cigarette and tried to calm his frazzled nerves. A couple of hours ago, Iris had walked into the den of their base of operations with a grim look on her face, which was notable, as she was not one for making announcements. Kerr and Boris were about to go out by the lake, to check into a lead on another possible hide-out for the blood mages, while Aelif had already gone to see what he could find at the university library. 

“We have to team up with the people from Sarif,” she said, bluntly and without preamble. It was enough to stop everyone before they went on their way.

“Why do you think that?” he had asked, knowing this was not an argument he would win.

“One, I can keep playing cat and mouse with their computer man, but it’s costing too many resources,” she said, shaking her head. “I won’t be able to do a lot else if I keep having to stop him from tearing down whatever I can cobble together, and we’re already having to fight on another front. It’s embarrassing. Two, we aren’t at cross purposes, they probably want this gone too, and why use all our firepower when we could use theirs? Three, I don’t wanna get tranqed again and I don’t think you want to be stabbed, so if we could get that Swiss Army knife on our side, that would be nice. Four-“

“Ok, ok, you have some good points,” said Johnny. “But what makes you think they want to join up with us? We did just make an awful mess of their corporate headquarters. Might make them a little sore.”

“I can make the hacker see sense,” said Iris. There were some other minor objections, but Iris had come prepared. Johnny let her go try and make contact and twenty minutes later, she was back with Frank Pritchard on the line, and an alliance was formed.

On the plus side, most of their team got on the same page really quickly, and were able to pull in their resources to make plans. On the slightly more complicated side, it turned out Sarif’s walking armory also was heading towards the university library system, and their tech-glitch-prone, currently offline, ‘stab first answer questions about that stabbing later’ mage was out of the loop.

“I got this,” said Iris, sending a message to the other hacker through his apparently even-tempered partner, which got Aelif back on comms. Something that spoke well to the success of their new partnership, was that Pritchard was able to get in contact with his other half, who had made contact with Aelif, and amazingly had managed to talk his way around being stabbed. Before Aelif’s too-sharp tongue could shred their new alliance, Iris cordoned him off into a private audio channel and brought him up to speed. 

Johnny could always trust Iris with discretion. She and Aelif had an understanding. She kept repairing the computer gear he managed to destroy, and he trusted her more than anyone except maybe Johnny. But it also meant that she could take a verbal chunk out of him without losing a corresponding physical chunk at a later date.

When they all came back together, they agreed Johnny and Iris would come down to the library and they would coordinate their next move. It was a good plan.

Or at least it _had_ been a good plan, until about twenty minutes ago, when there was a horrible screech in the comms, and Aelif dropped offline again.

This felt a lot less accidental.

“Only cameras are in the stairwells,” said Iris. “And none of those are showing anything weird.”

“Heads up, we have something interesting incoming,” said Johnny. Coming down the sidewalk was Sarif’s security chief, looking just as threatening as he had felt the night before in the shadows. He’d obviously tried to look a little bit less like a walking weapon; a sweater and a long coat over long pants and sunglasses. But there was only so much you could do when over half your body was made of carbon fibre and mechanical joints.

Johnny felt the sweat on the back of his neck drip, but he plastered a lazy smile on his face. They were on the same side, after all.

“I was expecting two of you,” said Johnny, tapping on the rolled down window of the car. Jensen stopped a car’s length away and lit up a cigarette of his own. “But there were apparently some communication mishaps?”

“I can’t say I understood what happened,” said Jensen, looking wary. “But a box on the table flashed, an earpiece exploded, and suddenly he wanted to be anywhere but there. Told me to get the hell away from him, he’d be down in a minute.”

“That tracks.” Johnny glanced into the car. Iris rolled her eyes and gave a small ok sign. Apparently that would explain the sound they'd heard. Great. “I’m guessing you just hit a sore spot. I would apologize for my compatriot's manners, but honestly, it doesn’t look like he tried to kill you, so you got off light.”

“Libraries have changed a lot since I’ve last been in them,” said Jensen. “They barely make a fuss when you have an all-out fire fight over the encyclopedias. Hardly a shush in sight.”

An audible snort from the back seat drew Jensen’s gaze back there, allowing Johnny to get a read on the aug. He did seem genuinely confused, which meant Aelif probably had just run off without explaining himself.

Which honestly, sounded just like him.

Johnny chuckled as he put out his cigarette and wiped his palms on his coat before offering his hand to Jensen to shake.

“Well, here I am casting aspersions on Aelif, but then I am being rude. Johnny Rocket, private investigator. Nice to formally make your acquaintance under less...clandestine circumstances.” 

“Adam Jensen. Sorry about last night.”

“You don’t have to be.” Johnny shook hands with a warm but tired smile. “It comes with the job. I’m glad you were willing to get information first and do damage later. It went a long way towards Iris’s suggestion to combine forces after she contacted your hacker. If she can shrug off you tranqing her, then who am I to get pissy about a tense conversation.”

“Do you have multiple hackers, or am I meeting CatzEye?” said Jensen, leaning over and waving. Iris saluted from the backseat without popping her head up.

“The rest of the crew are either back at base, or will be soon, so it looks like you’ll be able to meet everyone pretty quickly,” said Johnny, taking a look behind Jensen. Jensen turned to see what Johnny saw, Aelif stepping out of the library, the hood of his sweatshirt up, a large leather bag on his hip. “Give me a second, would you?”

Johnny walked down the street towards Aelif, meeting him on the sidewalk. As Johnny closed the distance, the elf kept his head down.

“Hey, hold up” Johnny stopped Aelif by stepping in front of him. “Anything happen back there I need to know about?”

“No, I took care of it.” Aelif's voice sounded rough, like he had been yelling. He continued staring at the ground.

“Ok, I need you to look at me if I’m going to believe that” said Johnny.

Aelif sighed. He pulled his hood back and he looked up at Johnny, rolling his eyes. There was a large cut above Aelif’s left brow, and a heavy bruise darkening his jawline. There also was an impact mark under his left eye, and a bruise radiating out beneath his eye socket.

“Holy shit, Aelif,” said Johnny, glancing back towards the car. “What happened in there?”

“Oh, it wasn’t him,” said Aelif, sounding frustrated. “I wouldn’t have let him leave, are you kidding me? There was a spirit spying on us, and it manifested on the roof. It threw a bookshelf at me on the way. I didn’t dodge in time.”

“Why didn’t you bring in backup?” said Johnny, trying very hard not to raise his voice. Yelling was not going to help. 

“It fried out my earpiece.”

“But you had a walking armory.”

“I’d already sent him downstairs, ok? It was stupid! But letting the spirit get away would have been worse.”

“You could have died.”

“I’m aware, Johnny. Getting hit with a bookshelf was not actually the plan.”

“I’m glad to hear you actually are planning anything,” said Johnny, starting to sound frazzled. “What’s the matter with you, Aelif? You aren’t usually this reckless.”

“I don’t know,” said Aelif softly, holding his forearms tightly. “I...something about this whole thing feels weird. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s making me jumpy.”

Johnny sighed. This was not a conversation they needed to have on a sidewalk, for pity’s sake.

“Let’s get back to base.” Johnny scanned the distance, trying to give the other man some emotional space. “Brynn is resting off some magic burn, but should be able to heal you up. Can you manage a car glamour? If we’ve got spirits everywhere, I’d rather break trail on the way back.”

“Of course.” Aelif pulled his hood back up and started towards the car, his hands shoved in his pockets.

“Ok, looks like we're ready. Hop on in,” said Johnny, approaching the car. Aelif walked past the car, not looking at their new contact, and circling around to open up the backseat driver’s side door. Jensen took the front seat after a moment's hesitation.

“You’ve got the cameras in there, right?” said Aelif to Iris, tossing the bag in before sliding in the back.

“Yeah, yeah.” Iris typed into her laptop, hunched over and laser focused. “I got started when our local color told us about the lapse of comms. Surprisingly, there aren’t any cameras inside the upper floors of the library, but I pulled and dumped all the stairwells and the surrounding area for the day.”

“Did something happen?” asked Jensen, looking into the back. Aelif pulled his hood farther over his face and slumped in the seat. 

“Yes.” Aelif faced away, out the window. “But I took care of it.”

“Except for the cameras,” said Iris. She gave the front seat a thumbs up, and Johnny pulled into traffic. 

“Well, I knew you would be on top of it,” said Aelif, taking the earpiece out of his pocket and tossing it over to the side of the seat. “We need to try a different configuration. It blew up again.”

“Seriously?” said Iris, finally raising her eyes. She looked at the earpiece, and over at Aelif. “This looks like blood. Let me see the damage.”

“Come on, Iris,” said Aelif, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Can’t this wait until later?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, putting her hand on his bag. “You’re just going to disappear as soon as we get back. Come on Johnny, back me up here.”

“You know she’s right,” said Johnny, as he turned onto the freeway. “We’ve got another fifteen minutes, and you know you’re going to find Brynn for healing when we get back. Just show her already.”

“Fine,” said Aelif, pulling down his hood. Johnny saw Jensen’s eyebrows go up in surprise. So Aelif was telling the truth about that at least. 

The damage looked just as bad in the car as it had outside, but Aelif narrowed his eyes at Jensen, and lifted his hair back so Iris could see where the earpiece had exploded.

“Ok, seriously though, what happened after I left,” said Jensen, turning around to give the other man’s wounds a look. 

“The whisper charm told me there was something magical listening before it exploded my earpiece,” said Aelif, leaning over so Iris could get a better look at his ear. “After I sent you downstairs, I had to make sure whatever it was didn’t report back. It didn’t take that well.”

“Didn’t want any help with that?”

“What were you going to do with a spirit? Glare at it while it threw a bookcase at you?”

Iris flicked Aelif’s ear. He flinched away saying ‘hey!’ and turned to glare at her. She met his stare with a calm expression, unblinking.

“You’re being stupid because you’re mad,” said Iris, pointing at his eye. Aelif leaned back against the door with a huff. “Don’t be a butt just because things aren’t going well. Was it the whisper charm or the spirit who exploded the ear piece?”

“I don’t know,” said Aelif, chewing on his lip. He turned to look out the window and sighed. “There was something weird about how the whisper charm was reacting. I’m going to have Kerr look at it when we get back. When I tracked down the air spirit that triggered the charm, it started throwing things around. In order to keep quiet, I tossed down a silence and I had to lure it up to the roof, but I took a book cart to the face.”

“Silence?” said Jensen, mostly seeming to follow what was happening but tripping on the details.

“Magic. Dampens sound. It was that or have some stupid kids wander in,” said Aelif, looking out the window. “I’d prefer to not beat up children just because they came across some flying books.”

“And I’m sure they appreciated it,” said Johnny, pulling into an anonymous looking housing development. “But speaking of which, can you help break the trail here? I don’t think we were followed, but I’d hate to gamble on it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Aelif closed his eyes and spread his hand out on the door. The car shuddered, but then it was like the image of it _shifted_ slightly, like it wasn’t quite the same car it had been a moment ago. 

Aelif made a pained noise. Johnny looked back in the rearview mirror. The elf had his eyes screwed shut, and his skin was covered in sweat.

“...if there is any way you could drive faster, it would be appreciated,” Aelif gritted out between clenched teeth. Jensen looked back at Iris, as if to see if this was something overly worrisome, but she just glanced up from her laptop and shook her head.

“We’ll be there soon.” Johnny pulled a u-turn, merging back on to the main drag. “Try and give me a heads up if there’s a problem.”

“There won’t be a problem if you just drive,” said Aelif, leaning his head back, his eyes still closed. 

“This is why you couldn’t just follow us in your car, by the way,” said Johnny, making conversation as he put his foot down and sped up considerably. “If we are being followed, we don’t have enough mages to go around to break our trail haphazardly. And the twins are busy.”

“I’m sure that makes sense,” said Jensen, tilting his head as if he was trying not to look too closely at the dashboard. Johnny could sympathise. The inner parts of the car weren't quite focusing correctly. “I’ve been told this town is weird for magic?”

“I see Aelif shared his theory.” Johnny turned into another housing development, this one slightly more wooded and isolated than the last. “It is odd, I will give you that. I only get some of it, being more of a hybrid.”

“Hybrid?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a couple augments, but I’m a physical adept,” said Johnny, waving a hand around his face in a wobbly gesture. “Not really a full magic user, not really a full magic monk, but it helps with the private eye work. Or at least it did when that was what I did full time.”

As they drove down the street, one of the two garage doors on an under-house garage at the end of the street opened. Johnny pulled in, and parked the normal looking 4-door car next to a far more kitted out SUV. The garage door closed behind them with a thump.

“Ok, we are clear,” said Johnny. Aelif let out a shuddering breath from the back seat, leaned forward and rested his forehead on the front seat. “How are you holding up back there?”

“Where’s Brynn?” asked Aelif, ignoring the question. Iris closed her laptop.

“In the back,” said Iris, tucking her things away and opening her door. “She knows you’re coming. I’ve got your bag. Come find me in the lab after.”

“Thanks,” he said, opening the door and ducking out, staggering a little as he went around the back of the nearby SUV before disappearing out of sight. Iris soon followed, a little lopsided for her small frame, but not overburdened.

“I guess I’ll give you the tour,” said Johnny, exiting the car, as Jensen unfolded out of the passenger’s side. The aug had a look of consternation on his face, looking after where Aelif and Iris had disappeared. “Full introductions will have to wait until the last team makes it back from the lake. They were following up on a lead while Aelif was researching. When they are back we can plan our next steps.”

“A look around seems like a fine time,” said Jensen, shaking his head a little as if to clear his head. Johnny tried to read his expression, but with the dark shades and the neutral expression, not much showed on his face. “After you.”

~~

It took all of fifteen minutes for Johnny to show Jensen the full house, but it gave him a good idea of what the out-of-towners were working with. There was a surprising amount of firepower in this rented home, with the basement converted into a kind of make-shift barracks, rooms dedicated to both magic and technology, while still maintaining the illusion that nothing untoward was occurring. It was impressive, if at the same time, unassuming. 

But it also wasn’t getting them any closer to the growing threat they needed to take down. Jensen was really just hoping to reach the point they started to plan taking down this supposed cult.

At least he wasn’t the only one champing at the bit. As Johnny excused himself to answer a call from the team at the lake, Iris came into the den off the kitchen that was being used as their common area, carrying a laptop. She tossed a flash drive Jensen’s way with updated securities certificates and permissions so he could finally interface with their comms, then nestled into the couch in the center of the room, deeply entranced in whatever she was working on. Johana, the vehicles expert they had to thank for the pileup in the lobby, was working on some drones in the corner, fine-tuning the transmitters inside. She kept her head ducked down, but her eyes kept popping up nervously, trying to get a handle on the new person in their midst.

Subtle she was not. But Jensen wasn’t going to hold it against her. 

Soon after, the other mage he'd heard about came in. If Jensen was under the impression that magic required a practitioner to be prickly and cranky, she was all warm smiles and friendly waves. She was broad shouldered, with long red hair in a thick braid, and fawn colored clothing that looked distinctly nordic. She walked up to Jensen and introduced herself with a grin.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m Brynn.” She tossed her braid over her shoulder. “I believe you met my fire spirit earlier? When it was going to town on that blood spirit?”

“You do great work,” said Jensen, returning the smile. “Adam Jensen.”

“I’ve heard,” said Brynn, grabbing an apple from the counter and tossing it between her hands. “I’m pleased we aren’t at odds. We need all the help we can get. You might have heard things are a little hairy.”

“Hoping we can get that down to moderately fuzzy,” said Jensen. “Have you taken a look at Dr. Wilson’s research yet?” 

“Oh, Kerr will be much more helpful with that, he’s more of the bookish one.” She took a bite out of the apple. “I’m really a lot more hands-on.”

“But you’re not on the away team?”

“Well, unlike some people who broke their face bones on a book cart, I also understand you have to take a break sometime,” she said, grinning with all of her teeth. Something about the gesture made her seem very young, but Jensen couldn’t quite put a finger on her age. “Magic isn’t free, and corralling that blood spirit had some wicked kickback. My brother was feeling fine, but his spirit was mostly playing a support role. I ended up taking most of the magic burn.”

“And we all very much appreciated it,” said Johnny, walking into the room with some datapads. “It looks like Boris and Kerr are on their way back, so let’s circle up and get started. Where’s Aelif?”

“I think he was going to shower?” Brynn cocked her head back towards the bathroom. “There was a lot of blood, and you know, healing bones is pretty painful. I’d expect him to be a minute.”

“We can fill in some background while everybody else gets here,” said Johnny, handing both of them data pads, and flicking on the large screen on the wall. “Iris, you got visuals?”

“Yeah, boss,” she said, tapping on her keyboard. Johana got up from the pile of drone parts on the other side of the room and moved over to the other end couch. Brynn jumped over the back of the couch and sat in the middle, apple in mouth, pad in hand, bouncing with excitement. 

Jensen stayed back by the counter. There was already too much going on here without stressing about seating arrangements. 

“Right,” said Johnny, as Dr. Meredith Wilson’s picture came up on screen. “So, Wilson is probably the best place to start. Given what we found at Sarif HQ, we know that she is not just a researcher is profiting off the group’s work, but is in fact another blood mage whose hands are very dirty. Jensen, you found some of her research?”

“Yeah, I turned it over to Aelif at the library. He seemed to think it was useful.”

“Good. We can check in on that when he’s back. But for now, let’s move on to our other knowns,” said Johnny, waving his finger in a circle. The screen progressed to another picture, this time a white guy with silver-black hair. “This is Jarrod Murray. Until yesterday, I would have pegged him for the ringleader, but now I’m not so sure. He’s a lawyer, has a lot of connections with various government agencies, really connected with bureaucracy. He’s on the board of directors at the museum, and was working closely with Wilson to get the exhibit cleared through customs, which is how we got wind of Wilson. Has absolutely made people disappear without the aid of magic, if you know what I mean.”

“He’s the one that wrote the shipping contracts,” said Iris, screwing her mouth to the side. She was clearly not a fan. “They read like someone trying to trick a genie.”

“He shows up in business dealings in a lot of heavy hitters, but isn’t big on the radar himself. However, has a reputation for helping out the little guy, does a lot of charity work with immigrant agencies. Was our biggest lead into where they were getting victims until we connected him to Wilso. He’s good at covering his tracks, but he moves slow. Unlike his partner, Gwendolyn Murray.”

Next, the picture showed a woman in, charitably, her later fifties. Huge smile, large hair, and larger jewelry; the very picture of an aging hippie. 

“Gwendolyn is very active in every environmental cause that will take her, and given her large endowments, they all will. However, they’d all be horrified to know that she’s spent the last thirty years dripping as much poison into the landscape as she could possibly be cleaning out of it. She’s also very active in the non-profit crowd, but is more eccentric, so doesn’t do high-society. She has access to a lot of low footprint areas around town, and is friendly with a lot of small business owners. Like…"

A screenshot of a local car ad popped up, with a shot of ‘Crazy Tom’ with ‘low low prices!’ displayed.

“Tom Major, local car dealer. Even with the pivot to making augmentations, there is still a huge vehicle industry here, and the secondary car market has kept grinding on. Has Tom been using blood magic to make sure his competition finds nothing but misfortune? Seems likely.”

“He also runs some chop shops on the sly,” said Johana, speaking with a really timid voice. “Both manned and unmanned vehicles all over town, getting his hands on cars by hook or by crook. Mostly crook.”

“Not only cars,” said Johnny. “There was a scandal about ten years back where some bodies were found in the back of a van stolen off his lot. How the news ended up covering it, was it was probably human trafficking gone wrong. He was cleared of all charges thanks to Jarrod Murray and…” 

This next subject Jensen felt like he might have met before, back when he was on the force. The smiling face of the officer did not bring up any general recollections, but neither did it bring up any specific encounters.

“Captain Hugh Dirk. Not the dirtiest cop I’ve seen, but by no means an angel. Very good at keeping his fingers in a lot of pies, but also remaining off the radar.”

“I had to hack a lot of cameras to find something on this guy,” said Iris, looking over at Jensen, a rueful smile on her face. “And only had that lead because someone put something in an email they shouldn’t have.”

“It was a lucky find,” said Johnny, scratching his chin. “I’ve met his type before. Lazy by nature, but dangerous when provoked. Has spent a lot of time getting comfortable, but remembers what it’s like to do all the dirty work that got him where he is, and isn’t afraid to do a little more to keep himself comfortable. The worst of all worlds. Not cruel, but very practical. Might be more scary with ambition, but scary enough with what he has, honestly.”

The next picture that came up, unlike the others, was blurry, as if clipped from a CCTV camera. It was 3 forms, all running away from a car in a park.

“Next, we have the Weird Sisters. Bunch of street rats, but they’ve got eyes all over the place. We _think_ this is them, but we haven’t been able to get positive IDs . Part of that is Dirk being able to fuzz trails on them, part of it is that one of them is a prominent hacktivist that goes by WyirdSyster, but mostly they are scary and brutal. We know there are at least three of them, but there might be more. They’ve only bubbled up in the last year, so they are the newest blood in this group. They’ve wiped out competition for Major, put the hurt on clients for Murray, just an all around dirty crew. This is the street, now if we are looking at high society...”

Again, the image was replaced with a picture of a man and a woman, dressed in very nice evening wear, sitting at a table in what looked like a very expensive restaurant.

“The Petrovs, Phyllis and Arnold, our final known players. Phyllis comes from old money, and Arnold comes from old industry, and together, they came from New York and settled into Detroit high society, and have made their names here. They are the least connected to the rest, just some minor dealings with Wilson and Murray. Nothing sticks to them, and they are vicious to anyone who tries to malign them. In comparison to some of the other players, they're harmless. However, they do have a small private security force, which keeps people out of their business.”

“I still think these two have more than just money behind them,” said Aelif, walking into the room, hair damp, wearing a dark grey sweater and some black pants. His face wasn’t mangled anymore, but he didn’t look very happy either. He leaned against a wall and crossed his arms. “They came out of nowhere a couple of years ago, and the whole group found their focus. But nothing comes up about them.”

“You don’t like them because their background is mysterious,” said Brynn, tossing her head back over the couch. She made a scowling face at him, mocking in a playful way. Jensen could see it wasn’t landing well. “They’re children, spoiled dabblers at being bad. They’re the least harmful by a wide margin.”

“First off, I don’t ‘like’ anyone.” Aelif rolled his eyes. “But also, I disagree. Just because we don’t have any crimes to pin on them doesn’t mean they haven’t done anything. That the cult’s plans accelerated when they arrived is evidence of schemes. If we get a chance, I’m all for taking them out first.”

“It’s not a bad plan” said Jensen, and both Brynn and Aelif’s faces whipped in on him, laser focused. “Private security and expansive funding are a nasty combination, and crippling that sooner rather than later is a strong play. What kind of industry does he come from?”

“Traditionally, food processing,” said Aelif, with a grimace. He pushed away from the wall with a shrug. “They have a cannery by the river that Boris and Kerr were checking out. However, they have recently started to branch out in the last ten years into medical research. That’s when they moved here.”

“Speaking of the cannery,” said Johnny, as a picture of the cannery popped up. “Farm Fresh Foods cannery is closed this month for some equipment overhauls. Much of the factory is automated, but the few non-automated workers have been paid off to not be there this whole month, so it seems likely something wild is going down.”

“It’s also going to be terrible to break into,” said Johanna, typing into a datapad, highlighting the walls on the picture, bringing up an x-ray grid of the building. “All the machines in there are made to work autonomously, but also to be super adaptable to outside stimulus. In one of the shipments that Iris intercepted, we found military grade missile launchers and counter-IED systems. They've probably been spending the last couple weeks turning their factory into their own personal terror mech.”

“Maybe,” said Iris, sounding skeptical. “We don’t know what they are doing with all that equipment. They might just be regular old arms traffickers.”

“Look, I don’t shoot down your hacker theories…”

“I don’t say they are turning their buildings into transformers!”

“You can see why we sent scouts,” said Johnny, gesturing towards the picture, rubbing his forehead. “There’s still a lot we don’t know, but they are scaling up their plans fast.”

The rumble of a garage door signaled that the lake team had finally returned. 

“Ok, let’s stop there, let Boris and Kerr get in.” Johnny set the datapad down on the table. “Brynn, Johana. Come with me and let’s see if they need help. Aelif, would you make some coffee?”

“Sure,” said Aelif, walking into the kitchen, being sure to give Jensen a wide berth. As the trio made their way to the garage, Aelif retrieved a grinder, a coffee pot, and what looked like a scale from a shelf, and looked into the cupboard. “Any preferences?”

“Do we still have the stuff from the place with the squirrel?” said Iris, looking up from some furious typing and running a hand through her hair. “And can you grab me an energy bar?”

“Yes and I guess.” Aelif tossed a bar in Iris’s general direction, before unwrapping one and biting into it. He then busied himself making coffee. It was a lot more steps than Jensen usually thought of when someone said ‘make a pot of coffee’, but after a few minutes, coffee was definitely filling a pot.

“What do you think of the rogues gallery?” asked Aelif, as he tidied up the counter, looking over at the other man with a quick glance. “Any insights you want to share?”

“Still sorting through the details.” Jensen glanced back towards the picture of the cannery. “So, why do you really not trust the Petrovs?”

Aelif dropped the bag of beans on the counter. Iris snorted. Jensen knew he was onto something.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Aelif snatched the bag and threw it in the cupboard. He turned towards Jensen with a scowl. “They just don’t add up, that’s all.”

“Plenty of people on this list seem to have huge holes in their background. Couple of them even seem insufferable. But you seem focused on these two. What’s different?”

“Why isn’t escalation enough? I don’t see why that isn’t a good reason to think there’s more there.”

“Come on,” said Jensen, a smirk growing on his face as Aelif grew more agitated. “I haven’t known you that long, but you aren’t irrational. There’s obviously a reason you don’t want to say. You’re either hiding some information for a strategic reason, or a personal reason. I’m just trying to figure out what it is.”

“Why does it matter, then? What if it is a personal reason?”

“That’s fine, but our interactions of late haven’t really filled me with the spirit of confidence and cooperation. So humor me. Give me something to work with here.” 

“You should tell him, Aelif,” said Iris, her mouth full of energy bar. “He’s not going to let it go.”

“Fine.” Aelif crossed his arms. “Their M.O. reminds me of another family of old money, heavily into crime, out of New York. I had some unfortunate dealings with them years ago. I don’t think they are the same family, but too many things are similar for comfort. I mean, we’re already too far east for my comfort, but that’s beside the point.”

“When you say dealings-”

“None of your _fucking_ buisness,” hissed Aelif. “I don’t _care_ what kind of spirit you’re filled with, unless you are speaking in tongues, and need to be exorcised, that’s all you _get_.”

“Okay, okay,” said Jensen, putting his hands up. “I don’t need to know any more. But I do have one other question.”

“ _What._ ”

“Can I get a cup of coffee? Smells good.”

Aelif narrowed his eyes at Jensen, but grabbed a cup out of the cupboard and poured him a cup anyway. He set it on the counter with a thump.

“Watch it with that cut rate detective work, Sherlock, or you are going to find yourself in a mystery you can’t tranq your way out of.” Aelif opened the cupboard door again. “Iris, you want coffee?”

“Yeah, throw some milk in it, will you?” she said, tapping away at her keyboard. Some text popped up in the bottom of Jensen’s field of vision. 

_A doesn’t talk about N3w Y0rk. Fun as watching you 2 go @ it is, A only gets mOAr prickly. Take ur win m8. :P_

Jensen blinked a couple of times, and looked over at Iris. As Aelif handed her a cup of coffee and turned back for the kitchen, she caught Jensen’s eye and _winked_.

He couldn’t tell if she actually was on his side or just trying to make trouble, but for the moment, he would take it. He lifted his cup of coffee to her in a ‘cheers’ gesture.

Thumping from the stairs signaled the return of the rest of the team. Jensen sipped on his coffee and braced himself. 

“Little buddy!” came a booming voice from beyond the kitchen. Jensen turned to look, and as he did, a large, red-headed shape came lumbering forward, straight toward Aelif. As if with one motion, Aelif grabbed the oncoming shape and flipped it, tossing the person on to their back.

The resounding thud was followed by an almost crystalline silence, as the rest of the team stopped in the entryway to the room. Brynn stood in front, both hands slapped over her mouth, stopping whatever reaction was trying to spill out, but Johnny was right beside her, with a look of horror on his face.

The silence was broken by the large man on the floor who bore, if Jensen was to be honest, a _remarkable_ resemblance to Brynn. The man started laughing, full-voiced and joyful. From behind her fingers, Brynn’s laughter escaped, cementing their relationship as siblings beyond a doubt.

“Kerr, I swear to every god you care to name,” said Aelif, straightening up as if to try and regain some dignity. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. I’m not a _hugger_. I’m going to hurt you one of these days.”

“Oh, friend Aelif,” said Kerr, pushing himself up off the ground. “You won’t hurt me. We have been through so much together! We are brothers in arms!”

“Brynn, if you care about your brother’s wellbeing, please get him to shut up.” Aelif stalked to a position as far away from Kerr as he could get, which, unfortunately for Aelif, was beside Jensen. He crossed his arms and slumped against the wall, glowering. “Next time you are going through a _window._ ”

“Ok, everyone,” said Johnny, pushing everyone into the room. “Calm down y’all. Let’s get our heads back in the game and start planning.”

The team shuffled back in, plus the afore-tossed Kerr and a large augmented man with a large cybernetic eye who Jensen assumed was Boris, chatting and smiling, getting settled. As the rest of the team mingled, Jensen offered his coffee to Aelif with a tilt of his head.

“Looks like you might need this more than I do,” said Jensen, pushing the mug forward. Aelif looked up at him a moment, and took the cup with a nod of thanks.

Maybe Jensen was getting the feeling for this team after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took a little longer! The next chapter will probably also take a couple weeks: we are starting to hit the bridge chapters I have sketched out, but need to fill in.
> 
> However! Next time: astral combat, many stealth take-downs, and bird-watching.


	8. Sound of Your Bike as the Wheels Hit the Gravel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Jensen teams up with the outside crew to gather more intel, their shadow enemy takes that opportunity to strike. It's time to see if trust goes both ways

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! You might notice that this is neither of the things I teased last chapter! I did some rewriting and replanning, and the chapter I was working on got bumped a little later. It's still coming, but this happened instead. 
> 
> So, yeah! Whoops?

Jensen crawled forward in the vent, listening carefully to make sure that the museum was actually empty. He had to admit, sneaking into a place not filled with heavily armed combatants was novel.

“Kappa, how close are you to opening the way?” came Johnny’s voice in his ear. “Should we do another loop?”

“I’m about to drop down, delta,” said Jensen, carefully pushing the vent out and grabbing it before it hit the floor. “Shouldn’t be more than 5 minutes.”

“Understood. We will prepare for entry.”

While there was less danger of being shot at, Jensen wasn’t going to underestimate having to handle a museum’s famously difficult security system. The museum had a skeleton crew, but they were mostly in their security room, monitoring screens and letting their systems do the heavy lifting. While Jensen wouldn’t want to go up against Prichard or Iris in a head-to-head-to-computer contest, he was perfectly capable of overwhelming some local systems on his own with his hacking skills. 

But if there was one thing learned experience told him, everything was easier if you could take out the entire problem at once. He could take out each camera one by one, then wait for guards to come by and knock them out, but it would be much easier to blind them and sneak past. 

While the cannery was high on their list of next targets, the team had agreed that hitting it right after Boris and Kerr had done recon would be ill advised. So, they had broken into two groups: Iris was still working with Prichard on some longer-term digging on the cult members, so she stayed at the safe house to give minimal support while Aelif and Kerr analyzed the research and Johana rewired some drones for air surveillance. While that was happening, Jensen had gone with Boris, Brynn and Johnny to extra-legally investigate the museum. 

There had been a little grumbling before they set off. But Jensen was beginning to suspect it was more reflexive than anything. As he popped out of the vent and slowly made his way down the hall, he recalled the last pieces of strategizing that had occurred before they left.

“Are you planning on bulldozing through the museum, and picking what you can find out of the rubble?” Aelif eyed the departing group. “Because they aren’t going to let you talk your way in, Johnny. We ruled this out before because the security system is tricky. The two access points are in the control room and the server room, but you’ll have to be physically present at either of them. The system is closed, proprietary, and difficult to get into. And since it’s monitored live, you can’t destroy the cameras without kicking a hornet's nest.”

“It doesn’t look that bad,” said Jensen, reading the blueprints that were pulled up on the screen in the middle of the room. “If I go in up there, I can get to these three cameras and loop them, then let everyone in at this door. As long as they haven’t added any extra patrols, it'll be simple.”

“You know you’ll have to get past the security system first, right?” Aelif looked him up and down before shaking his head. “I could get in there, but it’s going to take stealthy maneuvering to make it to this first point without being spotted.”

“You know? I did actually pick up on that.” Jensen ignored the jab at his abilities. “But the south vent goes almost all the way through. The fifty-foot drop is the only bit that will be tricky, but I have a couple methods to manage noiselessly.”

The elf looked unimpressed, but shrugged. “Not my call. It’s all on what Johnny feels comfortable with.” Aelif looked over the notes on the table between himself and Kerr, and sighed. “We’ve got too much to do here and it’s our second best lead.”

“It will be fine, Aelif,” said Boris, checking his equipment as he loaded it into a duffle bag. “It’s not like we’re breaking into the Louvre.”

“And it’s not my ass on the line if it turns out Dumbo here can’t really fly.” Aelif glanced over at Jensen before looking back down at the research. “So, as I said. Not my call.”

“I actually have a name, you know,” said Jensen.

“I’m aware.”

“I’ve already made the call.” Johnny nodded to the room. “If you have any updates, send them through Iris. Away team, let’s roll out.”

And that had been that. It was relatively easy getting into the museum, the drop slowed with a minimum of noise, and now Jensen was unlocking the door to let the rest of the crew inside, without any of the guards the wiser.

“Delta, the path is open, over.” Jensen unlocked the outside door. 

“Copy, kappa. We are incoming,” said Johnny. “Check the area for unlabeled eyes, over.”

“Will do, delta.” Jensen stepped back away from the door to make way for the eventual incoming, looking around for unmarked cameras as per Johnny’s coded request. This was his first time seeing the parts of the museum that had previously been concealed by frowning museum officials and thick plastic sheeting.

While he scanned the room, he mused that the area itself seemed to be light on cameras. There were a couple, but they were all pointing outwards, recording anyone who left the area. Almost as if someone didn’t want eyes on the artifacts themselves.

The exhibit was still mostly packed away, but the visible items painted an interesting picture of the displays to come. The focal point of the piece was a large slab flanked by two stone obelisks, both mostly covered with heavy cloth. While he didn’t want to dig in before the rest of the team arrived, getting the lay of the land seemed like a wise choice.

The center stone slab contained a gruesome tablou of animal-faced characters dragging other figures from both sides and tossing them into a violent looking swirl in the center. Angry looking creatures lined the entire bottom edge, eating and dancing and generally looking terrifying.

Given everything he knew about the cult so far, none of this looked good.

He was broken out of his observations by the door opening, letting in the rest of the team.

“Very smooth.” Brynn took in the room with a wide smile. “That went as easy as anything.”

“Your lack of surprise is positively gratifying,” said Jensen, turning to Johnny. “So what’s the plan now? What’s the next step?”

“Extensive pictures,” said Johnny, dropping a small black bag on one of the display pedestals, examining the large stone mural. “Especially of whatever this is. Leave everything the way you found it. Open boxes. If something looks important, we will reevaluate. Brynn, anyplace we should start?”

“Nothing’s lighting up.” She squinted around the room. “It’s all got kind of a background glow, but nothing too bright. Maybe the big rock is a little bit brighter than the rest?”

“Unsurprising.” Johnny rubbed his forehead under his hand, before reaching in the bag and handing out cameras. “Ok people, let’s go. We are on borrowed time here. I want us ready to walk out in fifteen.”

With that, they got to work, no discussion, no commentary. They carefully unwrapped the obelisks, finding upon closer examination that both stone pillars were covered in the same writing Jensen had seen in Dr. Wilson’s notes. The process of taking photos was painstaking, and no one wanted to miss anything.

Which made it inconvenient when Prichard’s voice popped up in Jensen’s ear.

“Jensen, are you finished getting your information yet?” Prichard sounded like he was whispering.

“No, I’m still in the field,” Jensen looked around to see if the rest of the team was hearing this. Their lack of reaction said no. “Is something wrong?”

“One of the Weird Sisters has a bunch of goons and is trying to break into my apartment building,” Jensen could hear a muffled alarm beeping in the background. His ear was blasted with static, and then Prichard continued. “They brought down the wifi, but they couldn’t lock down my intranet connection to Sarif, so I can still access your infolink. But I’m not sure how long that’s going to last. I need some help here!”

“Johnny, we have a problem,” said Jensen. The detective looked over with a confused expression. “Prichard is under siege at his apartment, and they’ve disconnected him from external networks..”

Johnny nodded sharply. “Tau, do you hear me?” 

Jensen waited. 

“Yes, delta,” said Iris. “Something wrong?”

“Do you have contact with our satellite?”

“Yeah sur-” Iris stopped in the middle of her sentence, and the click of her keyboard could be heard over the comms. “Shit, something is spoofing his connectivity. Fuck. This is bad.”

“Need you to circle the wagons, get out there, gather the rest of the team, and let theta take point. Know where you’re going?”

“Have the new guy get me the address, I’ve got to slap together a comms unit. Don’t worry, sigma will be driving, we’ll be there in no time. How loud should we be?”

“No noise complaints, but things can get noisy.”

“Understood. Over and out.”

“That takes care of that.”Johnny tilted his head towards Jensen. “If you can still get a message to Prichard, tell him to collect everything he needs from his apartment, lock himself in a closet, and wait for rescue.”

‘’Hang tight, Prichard. Help’s on the way. Grab everything you need and get in a closet.”

“Will do,” said Prichard, static starting to break through. “Please tell them to hurry.”

The line went dead. Jensen turned to Johnny, who held up his hand.

“I know that look,” said the detective, gesturing at the exhibit with a grim look on his face. “And we still need these pictures. Best thing we can do is finish up here and get back. We need to keep one step ahead of the other side. Ten more minutes, then we exfil.”

“Your logic is sound, but I don’t like it.” Jensen moved to help Brynn open one of the large crates, only to find it filled with pottery and paperwork.

“Buck up, lad,” said Boris, his voice gruff but warm. He was documenting the sculptures along the outer rim of the display area. “I’d trust those guys with my kid. They’ll have it taken care of by the time we return, and be on the way back before you know it.”

Jensen grunted noncommittally. There wasn’t much he could do at this point, but one thing still bothered him. “What did you mean by ‘noise level?” he asked as he looked through pieces of clay and stone, seeing more familiar triangles and squiggles carved into the pieces as he snapped photos. Brynn snorted.

“It means that unless things go really differently than I expect they’re gonna have to hide some _boooo-dieeeees_ ,” said Brynn, in a sing-songy voice. She jumped as Johnny clapped a hand flat down on a wooden box, echoingly loud in the quiet room.

“Brynn,” said Johnny, stern and final. “Go make sure there aren’t any outside eyes watching. Now.”

Brynn put down her camera with a smirk and bounced off to the perimeter of the exhibit, on the lookout for spirits or whatever other nastiness might interfere. Johnny turned to Jensen and sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Look. We are trying to keep as low a profile as possible, but mostly because we don’t want to alert our targets. Which means non-lethal, low impact, minimal collateral damage. Sometimes speed takes precedence. And that’s especially true when team member safety is on the line. Noise is shorthand for collateral damage. And given that there are active hostels…”

“...The likelihood for collateral damage goes up,” finished Jensen. He frowned, glancing past Boris and Brynn as they kept at the work of cataloging and keeping watch. “Can’t say I love the notion of hiding bodies.”

“Civvies aren’t the kind of collateral damage we’re talking about.” Johnny shrugged and took another picture of the displays. “On the other hand, I can’t promise that all hostiles are going to make it out alive. That isn’t our focus right now: we’ve gotta get out of here before we have some hard choices of our own to make.”

Jensen took the hint and returned to his task. He’d have to see exactly how lethal these people he had found himself working with were. And exactly what that changed about the unknown situation.

~~

Pritchard sat in the closet with his bag tucked by his side, listening to his heartbeat racing, hoping that every thump he heard was not someone finally breaking into his apartment. He pulled out a small tablet, checking whether the wifi was still locked down, switching proxies rapidly to try and break through the block. It was something to do to not distract himself from the oncoming doom. 

Potential doom.

A sudden burst of gunfire from outside startled him out of his distraction. It wasn’t close enough to be in the apartment, but it wasn’t _that_ far away.

Prichard found himself holding his breath. There wasn’t anything else he could do but hope for the best. 

His tablet buzzed, bringing him back to the here and now. A chat program opened, and started writing on its own:

 _‘Sup Nucl3arsnake! T3h c4lv4ry is h3r3, luv. U have inc0min in 90 s3c d0n’t fr34k h3’s my fri3nd ~CatzEye~_

Pritchard breathed a sigh of relief. His message had gotten out in time. 

His relief was shattered by the loud crash of breaking wood, followed closely by something slamming into the wall near his head. Indistinguishable noises continued, a skuffle filled with grunts and scraping metal. There was a final heavy thunk, followed by the sound of some dragging.

It was then eerily silent. He knew, logically, someone had to be out there. Whatever had been dragging things hadn’t just _disappeared_. But strain as he might, Pritchard couldn’t make out any other sounds.

Until there was a light knocking on the door.

“Room’s clear, Nuclear Snake,” said a male voice, scorn _dripping_ off each word. “Time to come out.”

Pritchard opened the door, squinting as his eyes readjusted to the light. Standing in front of the door was a black-clad man with a long, wicked knife in one hand, his face mostly covered by a mask, a black single strap backpack tightly strapped across his chest. As Pritchard scrambled to his feet, shouldering his bag, he surveyed the damage to his apartment.

The closet he had holed himself up in was just off the living room: what remained of a chair was scattered across the floor in front of that. His couch had been tipped over and one of its blankets hung from the ceiling fan, but all-in-all there wasn’t much damage. However, there was some dark liquid making the already dark wooden floor wet and shiny in the harsh halogen light.

“I wouldn’t do detective work on that unless you have a strong stomach,” said the man, obviously impatient, as he glanced at a pile of something lumpy covered by the couch’s other blanket. “I suggest we leave before a second wave of attackers comes.”

“Are you just going to leave those bodies there? Are they dead?” Pritchard looked around with mounting panic. “Who are you?”

The man sighed, wiped his blade on his leg and sheathed it, and dug in his pocket. He held out a clear box with an earpiece. “I’ll let ‘Cats Eye’, or whatever, convince you to move,” he said. “Let me make sure the hallway is clear. Don’t take too long.”

Pritchard took the box gingerly, and slipped in the earpiece.

“Hey,” said CatzEye, her smile coming across over the airwaves. Pritchard had only met her earlier that day, but it was nice to hear a familiar voice. “I see our friend made it to you! We’ve got a car ready, just need to get you out of the building.”

“Does your friend usually leave bodies lying around?” asked Pritchard, shouldering his bag and moving towards the door, not able to stop himself from looking at the oddly shaped pile behind him. It had to be his imagination, but it seemed like it was growing larger when he wasn’t looking.

“If he has to,” she said, very matter of factly. “But he’s on your side now. That’s a good trait.”

“Thanks, tau,” said the man by the door, half under his breath, as he scanned the hall. He turned back to Pritchard and looked him up and down. “Do you have a vehicle?”

“Your friend said you had a car.”

“We do, but there are more people out there than you first predicted,” said the man, getting more agitated. “Unless you are really good with a gun, someone has to draw some of them off. And the more questions you ask, the more likely we’ll have to deal with them in this chokepoint. Do. You. Have. A. Vehicle?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a bike.”Pritchard bristled at getting scolded. “Keys are by the door, to your right.”

“Great.” The man grabbed the keys and pocketed them, then looked out the door again. “Tau, we are making our play. Have sigma ready. Going dark.”

“Copy, theta,” said CatzEye. “Good luck, over and out.”

“Ok, techie,” said the man, gesturing for Pritchard to approach the door. “I came in from the roof, but I saw the layout of the building. We’re going to leave here, turn left, head down the staircase and leave out the door at the bottom. There’s a little hallway, then a door that goes outside to the front of the building, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Great. I’ll go first, and breach the door, but then you start down the stairs. Don’t dawdle. Our most vulnerable place is going to be the stairwell, followed closely by our run out of this door to the stairwell. Once we hit the door downstairs, we’ve got a lot of cover.”

“So, we’re only mostly screwed. Great.”

“Yeah, I don’t like it either. But it’s not going to get better.” He squinted at the coat by the door, and grabbed it and slipped it on. Pritchard opened his mouth to object, but the man held up his gloved hand. “Get ready, on my signal.”

As the man's hand came down, he shoulder-checked the door, bursting out into the hall, with Pritchard close behind. They ran for the stairwell, and the path was momentarily clear.

That luck dried up as, mere feet from the door, a rough looking youth with a dark grey hoodie pulled up and a scuzzy looking bandana over their face came around the corner, pointing a gun straight at them. Pritchard stumbled, slowing down in shock.

The other man, if anything, sped up, pulling a knife and slashing downward, catching the youth’s arm with the first slash. 

Using the forward momentum, the man wearing Pritchard’s coat ducked low, hitting the youth’s lower legs, flipping him onto the ground with his arm gushing blood, knocking the gun aside. The man slid into the wall, then got back up on his feet, and kicked the youth hard in the head, just as the shock of the impact caught up to the youth’s ability to start screaming, cutting off the yells as they started. He grabbed the gun, and looked at Pritchard with wide, furious eyes.

“Keep moving!” He shoved the gun in his pocket, stepping over the body and launching himself at the door, looking up the stairs as he gestured Pritchard into the stairwell. 

“What about that kid?” Pritchard stepped over the twitching body on the ground, but kept moving down the stairs. 

“I will come back and deal with this. But I can’t do that _and_ protect you. _Move_.”

Pritchard didn’t have a response to that, and he had stairs to run, so the stairs took precedence. A loud bang above him made him look up, but the square spiral of the stair made it impossible to see anything beyond the floor above.

“Keep moving,” hissed the man, catching up to him. “We’re almost to the front hall, and hopefully we can get you out the door.”

They made it to the bottom of the stairs, the sound of footsteps above them getting louder. As they exited the stairwell and made it down the hallway, the man stopped Pritchard and turned him so they faced each other directly.

“Ok, listen to me. Where is your bike?”

“It’s parked around back. Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry about it. You need to exit through this door. Your ride is out there. It’s got two smaller women and a fucking viking in it. I’m going to distract these assholes. Tell Iris that I had some cleanup to do, and I’ll get back as soon as I can, they shouldn’t wait for me, but watch for my signal before leaving.”

“But these assholes are looking for _me_!”

“Then it’s good we look so alike.” The other man put down his mask, and Pritchard found himself staring at his exact double, down to his slightly crooked nose. He found himself taking a half step backwards. The other man laughed. “Quick question, you like your apartment, right? I can’t convince you otherwise?”

“How did you do that?” asked Pritchard, reaching forward to touch the uncanny mirror image. The other man reached up and hit his hand away. “And yes! Why?”

“Rude,” the man said, glancing back at the stairwell. “And we don’t have time for questions. Short answer: magic. You should be able to get to the car without much trouble, but you _need to go_. You’re about to get a reputation for being able to do a lot of gymnastics. I promise I won’t blow up your apartment.”

Something large and threatening thumped at the bottom of the stairwell, and the man ran back to engage. Despite wanting to get more details on that promise of ‘no explosions’, Pritchard did not stay to see what else was might burst through the door. He turned and ran outside, scanning the street for the getaway vehicle. 

Across the street, there was a car with three people in it, and they were exactly as his doppleganger had described, with an open seat in the back. He hurried towards them and knocked on the window. The girl in back’s face lit up as she saw him, and she gestured for him to climb in. Introductions were quickly made as he settled.

“Where’s Aelif?” said Iris, also known as CatzEye, as he was finally able to put a face to a voice and a name. 

“Was that who ‘theta’ was?” asked Pritchard. “He said to leave without him, but wait for his signal.”

“Of course he did,” said Kerr, the large man in the front seat. “He didn’t mention what the signal would be, did he?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Johana, the mousy brunette behind the wheel. “He’ll make it big.”

“He promised not to blow up my apartment,” said Pritchard, looking to Iris for reassurance. She nodded. “Are we safe to stay here?”

“Well, it won’t be that, then,” said Iris. “So don’t worry. And Kerr has a masking spell up, so we’ll be fine. But Aelif’s right. A distraction is a good idea. We just have to wait for it.”

Despite the ongoing circumstances, Pritchard finally began to relax for the first time since he had caught a glimpse of the goons stalking him earlier this evening. Hopefully everything would be fine for his new double, running distraction as they made their getaway.

~~

Aelif watched the hacker slip into the car and breathed a sigh of relief. One less worry about this whole mess. 

He had three bodies to deal with, and at least two more hostiles in the building, but those weren’t terrible odds. Just bad ones.

He slipped out the door, and readied himself to scale the front of the building, rather than make his way up the clearly compromised stairwell. The more he could avoid being seen as the local computer talent, the better his disguise would hold. He rubbed his hands together, and started to climb, feeling his hands grow more sticky as the magic energy poured through them. It didn’t take long to reach the top floor, and in the dark he didn’t hear any startled sounds of detection. 

Detroit was really something else. He would have to be careful when he made it back home. He was starting to get lazy. Knowing almost no one was looking made showing off so tempting.

He headed back to the hatch he had pried open earlier and retraced his path to Pritchard’s apartment. There didn’t seem to be any sign of additional surveillance, which was fortunate. He carefully turned all the lights off in the front of the apartment, and went around straightening things up. He checked pulses on the two assailants, and found both of them survived. He unmasked both of them, finding a girl and a boy that couldn’t be older than fifteen. 

_Fucking...children. Don’t use them for gangfodder. Assholes._

He weighed the cost/benefit of disposing of two bodies versus just moving these subdued children elsewhere, and remembered that he also had another youth out in the hall. 

Firmly securing the assailants hands behind their backs with zip ties, he crept into the hall to check on the damage done by the youth, only to find they were no longer there. Their blood had smeared widely, so it wasn’t immediately obvious which direction they'd gone.

That was going to be a problem.

Spreading his hands, he cast a quick sterilize on the mess, making sure the blood cleared away, even if it wouldn’t do anything about the damage to the wall. 

He should be hurrying anyway.

Back in the apartment he patted down the two youths to see if there were any communication devices on either of them. Strangely enough, they were both clean. It also didn’t look like either of them had any obvious augmentations, though Aelif wasn’t going to go rifling around their bodies to check. It seemed like now that they were unconscious, they were out of the loop of their compatriots. 

Very odd. He shifted into his more magical vision to search for additional clues, but nothing caught his eye. Which really only meant whatever communication spell they were using wasn’t active right now. He’d have to be careful.

He crossed the apartment and looked out the window, spotting a large bush below. That was terribly convenient. Aelif cracked his neck and went to work.

Within minutes, he had levitated the unconscious bodies out the window into the bush and then sterilized the blood in the apartment with a judicious application of magic. While the apartment itself still looked like it had been tossed over, it now didn’t look quite so much like there had been a murder in it.

To be fair, there _hadn’t_ been any murder. At worst, a near manslaughter committed in self-defense while defending another. _Double_ defended, even. 

He wasn’t sure who he was justifying himself to at this point. Probably just exhaustion getting to him. 

He zipped up Pritchard’s coat and took a quick look in the mirror. Couldn’t say he loved the new look, but it should be worth it if he could draw the rabble away. He just needed to make a big enough exit that they’d notice. Without blowing up the apartment. Which would have been easiest.

It was ok. He was good at improvising. He’d been practicing.

He checked to make sure the front door to the apartment was locked, then he finished turning off the lights and hooked Pritchard’s helmet to his bag strap. He climbed out the window, closing it behind him. Climbing down the building in the dark, with a bulky backpack, on the shadowed side of the apartment might have been a little more dicey than doing it in the front, but he was used to climbing in air vents with no light at all. This was easy.

The sound of footsteps on the roof caused him to pause about ten feet from the bottom. He couldn’t quite see them by looking up, so he glanced over his shoulder at the shadow of the building, where he saw the silhouettes of a small group walking away from his current position. 

Wonderful. One less complication. He just had to make some noise. But first, catching the attention of the people on the roof.

He hurried to the two youths in the bush and, dragging them to the edge of the light, cut the zip ties on their arms. Aelif moved the lighter one to the grass, and reached into his bag for the emergency flash bang he had brought in case things went _terribly_ wrong, as well as a stim patch. He slapped the stim patch on the neck of the youth, who the light revealed to be the young boy, and started his way towards the parking lot.

As the stim patch did it’s thing, he heard a gasp of regaining consciousness, and he turned around and looked the young man in the eyes. Aelif almost laughed at the mix of confusion and recognition on the face of the youth, before remembering he was supposed to look scared.

The youth scrambled to his feet and looked around. He saw his friend and took one step towards her, but stopped, glaring at Aelif. He then took a step towards Aelif and patted himself down, looking for what Aelif assumed was a weapon but coming up empty. Finally, he cupped his hands to the air and yelled.

“Guys!” The young man moved towards him with a bravado that Aelif found hilarious. “He’s getting away!”

Bingo.

“Thanks, kid.” Aelif tossed the flashbang at him, then turned to run towards the bike. As the explosion went off, he cast a flash to bolster the light into the sky. The effect was instant and massive. There was a large boom, and the entire sky lit up with a flash bright as daytime. It was bright enough that the young man stumbled backwards, blinded, falling on his back.

Aelif glanced over his shoulder to the building, to see if he had successfully gotten the correct kind of attention.

Two figures were visible on the corner of the roof, staring down at him, backlit by moonlight, one standing tall, the other down on one knee. Another was rappelling off the building, with a another all the way down, running across the lawn to slam a stake in the ground, probably to anchor a zipline.

Aelif turned towards the parking lot, pulling Pritchard’s keys out of his pocket. Seemed like he was looking for a Honda of some sort. This didn’t seem like a bike-riding neighborhood, so he assumed he would know it when he saw it. Spotting the sleek, dark, built-for-speed street bike parked among the cars, he smiled. Oh, he was going to have a hell of a time. He flipped on his earpiece.

“Sigma, was that a big enough signal?” He made a show of trying to find something, giving his pursuers a chance to gain a little ground before he got out. He needed them to follow, after all. “I can try something bigger next time.”

“No, you _ass_ , that was fine.” Johana snorted as she laughed into the comms. “I wasn’t the one who had a problem with ‘subtle’ before. If you can lead them south, I’ll make sure nothing follows us back.”

“Can do.” Aelif closed the last bit of distance between himself and the bike. One last look behind showed that all six figures were in pursuit, and he was ready to go. He slipped on the helmet, revved the engine, and eased out of the stall. 

He started slow, weaving out of the lot, trying to keep an eye on the gang bangers, knowing this was the potential bottleneck. If he’d timed this right, they should be getting to their vehicle and racing after him. If he'd timed it wrong, they would block him off or miss him completely. But his best intentions could only go so far; he lost sight of them, and just had to make his way to the street. He rolled out, looking both ways as he turned left to make his way south.

As he merged into traffic, a car roared to life behind him and surged forward.

The chase was on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not even going to pretend that the chapter I thought was coming last time is next, because I know that there's going to be a shoot out, a conversation with Sarif, and some bleeding happening next time. Probably some magic too. Also snarky dialogue because I can't help myself.


	9. I'm gonna go ahead and go boldly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pritchard arrives at the safe house, Jensen and Johnny return from their mission. But not everything is going smoothly, so plans need to be made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter is a little shorter than some others, because my first draft for this chapter was 14k+, and um...i decided that I was going to edit it in smaller pieces and actually put it out more often than try and get it in a coherent whole and put it out at once. Expect some more steady updates over the next couple of weeks!

Jensen was relieved to find Pritchard sitting in the makeshift war room, side by side with Iris, comparing notes on what he presumed was the latest in their technological defenses. Johana was sitting on the floor in front of them, laughing and nodding, wrapping wire around a turbine. Kerr was in the kitchen, cooking up what looked like dinner for everyone.

The research into Dr. Wilson’s lab seemed to be stalled out, papers and notes still spread over the table.The other mage was nowhere to be seen. 

“We’ve got some great shots of creepy old stuff!” said Brynn, skipping into the room and leaning over her brother's shoulder, peering at what was cooking in the pot. “Sweet bro, are you making chili?”

“Figured it would be good to make sure everyone actually ate,” said Kerr, glancing back at the returning party. “Chili’s easy, we can make some cornbread, it will keep until everyone’s back. Seems like the museum was a success?”

“Easy in, easy out,” said Johnny, gesturing with a smile towards Jensen. “We had an easy time, no snags, no surprises. How about you guys? Where’s Aelif? I would have thought he'd still be working through the research.”

“He took the long way,” said Iris, turning back over her shoulder. “He ran interference so we could get away untracked.”

“Should we be worried about that?” asked Pritchard, looking at the clock. “He is riding my bike, and using my face. I would have thought he’d be back by now.”

“He’s switched over to our monitoring frequency so he should be able to call in if something goes wrong,” said Iris, tapping the side of her head and shrugging. “He’s got a half hour to check in before I’m worried.”

“I can’t believe he found a bike out here.” Boris flopped down on a chair. He looked pensive for a moment. “Come to think of it, I don’t remember the last time I saw him ride his to a job. Did something happen to it?”

“I’ve never seen him ride one,” said Brynn, jumping up and sitting on the counter. “I didn’t even know he could drive. I would have thought it’d go against his ‘no fun allowed’ policy.”

A startled ‘Hey!’ slipped out of Brynn’s mouth as a dishtowel hit the side of her head, thrown by her brother, a look of beleaguered exhaustion on his face. 

“Stop being catty and help me with dinner” Kerr turned back to the stove. “You don’t have to know everything about everyone. People just keep to themselves sometimes.”

She put up her hands in mock surrender, looking not even slightly sorry, but she did slide off the counter and washed her hands, getting ready to help.

“We talked about it once when we were trying to blend in at the beach like...a month ago,” said Johana, digging a pliers into a pipe, pulling out a coiled wire. “Wouldn’t go into a lot of detail. Said something about it being damaged, and getting it repaired as part of ‘cleaning house’ or whatever. Didn’t seem like he was in a hurry.”

“Come _on_ , who says something like that!” said Brynn, pulling a bowl out of the cupboard. “What does that even _mean?_ ” 

Iris and Johnny shared a look that was impossible to decipher, before going back to their respective tasks of computer research and team management. 

Jensen filed the whole scene away in his ongoing mental file of the slightly mercurial team dynamics. As long as there was a break in the action maybe it was time to see what else he could fill in.

“It seems like you run a pretty tight crew.” Jensen took a seat at the counter with a cup of coffee. Johnny came to join him, his own cup of black coffee gripped between his hands. “How long have you all been working together?”

“It varies. Some of us longer than others.” Johnny set his cup behind him and hooked his thumb under his rumpled coat, leaning back with a lazy smile. “Johana’s pretty new, and the twins we’ve worked with on and off, but the rest of us have been through a lot. Any reason you wonder, other than idle curiosity?”

“It’s useful to know things about people you’re about to do life threatening things with. Helps identify the red flags.”

“Fair point.” Johnny rubbed his jaw and squinted his eyes. “I’d give you some of our bona fides, but I don’t think the names would mean anything to you. The clients it would be appropriate to talk about don’t mean anything without context, and discretion is more than just good policy, it’s a vital necessity.”

Jensen nodded, taking a sip of coffee. Johnny snapped his finger, remembering something.

“Actually, there was an article written up about one of them.” Johnny pulled his datapad out of his coat, and after tapping some terms into a search engine, pulled up an article. “Yeah, right here: CreRedo Corp.”

Jensen skimmed the page, trying to get a sense of what had happened. CreRedo Corporation, said the article, had been found guilty of a large scale international fraud operation that spanned multiple subsidiary companies. The article went on about tax consequences, allusions to extortion, and money laundering. It didn’t bring up anything about attacks or hacking. In fact, if he didn’t know better, he would have thought this was a dry article about financial misdealings better suited to the courtroom than to a bunch of toughs rolling in with guns and magic. The only odd thing it mentioned was that all of this came to light after the death of its founder and CEO, I. Cristo.

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Jensen, looking up from the datapad. “But this doesn’t sound like your skillset.”

“This was just the cover story after the smoke settled. In reality, they were funding a set of eco-terrorists that were attacking other medical research competitors, hoping to pull the owners into an all-out war. Boris, Aelif, Iris and I, were hired by a third party to stop CreRedo, and also take out as many competitors as possible, so that Seattle didn’t become a battle ground.”

“And the financials are what actually made it into the news,” said Jensen, handing the datapad back to Johnny’s affirmative nod. “Seems like that third party had their own agenda. Don’t suppose I’d know who them.”

“That would be telling tales out of school, Jensen. Trust me, what happened was worse than anything that came out.” Johnny tucked the datapad back in his coat and picked up his coffee. “But those experiences cemented us as a unit. Things like that keep you together if they don’t tear you apart.”

Jensen thought about that for a moment, taking a drink of his coffee as he watched Boris laugh at something Pritchard had said. It looked like Boris was fixing a strap on Iris’s body armor, his huge beefy hands delicately sewing on a buckle where it had broken off. The whole room seemed very comfortable with each other, despite his and Pritchard’s presence. 

“Seems with all the work out there, you have some pretty strong roots in Seattle. Why come here?”

“We don’t do a lot of travel jobs, but our client was...let’s say insistent. We’re good at what we do, Mr. Jensen. There’s a reason we were asked to come here.”

“And what reason is that?”

“Now that’s a question, isn’t it?” Johnny gave Jensen a grin that the aug was sure typically was clenched around a cigar, all teeth and gumption. “When we figure that out, I’ll let you know. As it stands now, there are plenty of people far closer to this town who could have done this. Hell, despite what my testy friend might say, I’m sure you could have handled most of this yourself. But someone was keen on getting us here.”

“Why come if you didn’t know?”

“One thing you’ll find if you do this kind of work long enough, is if someone with enough power is insistent that you do a thing, even if you don’t _want_ to do it, that desire is going to mess with your life something awful. So after a while, you start to get a feeling for when it’s better to go with the flow, and wait for the opportunity to turn the situation to your advantage, rather than be moved around like a pawn.”

“I see.” Jensen sat back and took in the room. “So, is the paranoia part of the job, or do you come by that naturally?”

“You’ll find that it’s not paranoia after the first half dozen times.”

Whatever other pieces of wisdom Johnny might have had for Jensen were interrupted as Pritchard cursed under his breath and looked around the room. As his gaze fell on Jensen, his eyes narrowed.

This couldn’t be good. 

“Jensen, we may have a situation.” Pritchard stood from the couch and pointed towards the garage. “I just got an email from Sarif, letting me know he’s out of one of his all-day meetings and wants to talk. We should call him as soon as possible.”

“Great. Excuse us.” Johnny smiled as Jensen followed Pritchard. Jensen had hoped the two week executive bio-engineering summit would have given them at least the weekend to distract their boss before they would have to explain what the hell was happening at the company. But it looked like the sun never set on a multi-national industrial empire, and therefore it never set on David Sarif’s internal clock either. “So, are we getting our stories straight, or was there another reason you wanted to talk?”

“Yes, Jensen. I thought we might want to get our stories straight about what exactly we are doing, working with the people who blew up the lobby, against what, a secret society of blood mages?”

“It seems like you’ve got the basics just fine.”

“Be serious.”

“Let me handle it, Pritchard. Give the folks in the other room a heads up and let’s make the call.”

After a little shuffling around to find a place where it didn’t sound like they were calling from an echoing garage, they opened a call to a remote Swiss resort.

“Adam, Frank!” Sarif’s voice came from a staticky image on a laptop Pritchard had set up on a chair. David Sarif’s face flickered in and out of a lush green background. “What is this I’m hearing about a pile-up in the lobby of the building?”

“There was an accident, but things are more complicated than that,” said Jensen, straightening unconsciously. “We are on top of it, but it’s taking some time to dig out what’s really going on here.”

“Seems suspicious that it happened after the building was cleared out for fire upgrades.”

“We thought so too. Some things are just not adding up.” Jensen looked over at Pritchard and nodded. Pritchard, to his credit, tried to look like he agreed, but it wasn’t an expression that came naturally. Usually he argued just for the sake of hearing an opposing opinion, but they were trying to have a unified front tonight. “We think there may be a connection to a shipment that was supposed to go to the museum for that joint exhibit with the college.”

“Huh.” Sarif stroked his chin. It was clear he wasn’t quite buying it. “Frank, do you remember that crazy stuff Gwen Murray was raving about at the charity Christmas party last year?”

“Vaguely,” said Pritchard, scratching his head and tilting it to the side, not sure where this was going. “Wasn’t it something about the environmental impact of lengthening the human lifespan? And how human augmentation was a crime against nature because it was poisoning the earth with humanity? Why do you bring that up?” 

“Two weeks later, I saw Jerry Murray at the hospital dedication. We were talking about regulations, and he was really interested in the fire code all of a sudden. He brought it up, seemed like he was digging for information. I was vague, because after his wife’s ranting, I wasn’t sure if he was angling for some kind of smear campaign.”

“What did he want to know?” Jensen’s brow furrowed in deep suspicion. 

“Nothing too specific, son,” said Sarif. “Just how much of a pain it was going to be to upgrade for the fire, what kind of systems we were putting in. I was vague, said we were pulling people off in shifts.”

“That does seem odd, Boss.”

“What about that crate?” continued Sarif, still probing for more information. “Where is that fitting in?”

“We’re investigating some outside contractors with promising leads,” said Jensen, a wry smile tugging at his lips. “Nothing worth reporting yet, but the situation is under control. You should get back to your conference and let us take care of it. We will see you when you get back.”

“And you, Frank? Those contractors passing your background checks?”

“Of course, David,” said Pritchard, also keeping his face carefully blank. “I’m vetting them myself before I let them inside our networks, but they are doing good work. They're a little unconventional, but no red flags.”

“Well, if the both of you are in agreement, then I’m sure it will be fine,” said David, looking to the side at someone offscreen and waving. “Ok, gentlemen. I’ll leave it in your capable hands.”

The window greyed out and Jensen's mouth pressed into a flat line.

“I’m glad we already made the connection between the Murrays and the rest of this mess, or that conversation would have been _infuriating_.”

“I had forgotten about Gwen Murray’s crazy rant.” Pritchard snapped up the laptop and curled his lip, grimacing. “I thought David was jumpy about some drunk party guests clutching pearls about human augmentation. But it seems a lot more sinister now.” 

“This is going to do nothing for your paranoia.” Jensen paused thoughtfully as he let the revelations with Sarif bring the rest of their situation into perspective. “Looks like our new allies will need a pretty air-tight cover story by the time this whole thing is over.”

“Already on it. Hopefully we’ll have this all wrapped up by the time David is back in town. Hiding unsavory characters is a lot easier when they aren’t popping up to make more trouble, but Iris and I have plausible backgrounds on hand if anyone gets curious.”

“It does seem like they have a plan for most contingencies.”

Upon reentering the common area, it was clear something had changed. Boris and Kerr were packing up supplies in combat-packs, Johana was gathering fire power and ammunition, checking everything to make sure things were in working order. Iris was sitting up and furiously typing into her computer, her mouth set in a stern line. 

Johnny saw Jensen and Pritchard reentering the room, and crossed to intercept them.

“Everything all quiet on the western front?” asked Johnny, taking his hat off and rubbing his head.

“Yeah, we just got a little more corraborating information on the Murrays' involvement,” said Jensen, looking around the room with confusion. “What’s happening?”

“We’ve had a development.” Johnny gestured for the two of men to follow him. “Aelif called in with a potential second base, and requested backup.”

“Is there a reason he didn’t come back here first?” asked Pritchard, taking in the preparations. 

“He ran into some difficulties.” Johnny said, typing some information into a datapad and frowning. “I told him to disengage, hole up someplace and wait for us to relieve him.”

“But he was riding _my_ bike,” Pritchard muttered, scowling at the room. 

“He got shot,” said Brynn, walking past them with her hair high up in a ponytail and a backpack strapped on her back. 

“Your bike’s fine. He would have mentioned if he crashed it, that’s important intel,” said Johana, packing up guns in a duffle bag. “If there is one thing you can count on about Aelif, he keeps his exit routes open, and that includes telling people about all potential get-away vehicles.”

“Not actually comforting, but thanks.” 

“So, what’s the plan?” asked Jensen, turning to Johnny, ignoring the griping. “I assume we have some kind of idea where we are going.”

“It’s a building in the warehouse district.” Johnny pulled up a map of the area on the datapad, and showed him the layout. “Steel manufacturing plant of some kind, by the look of it. If you’re good with going out, it will be you, along with Boris, Brynn, Johana, and myself, ready to rumble. Iris and Pritchard can stay here with Kerr. If we need to have them come in as a second team, Kerr’s a good wheelman. Otherwise, they can manage the remote work from here.”

“Sounds reasonable. Do we know what we’re getting into?”

“There were six gang members in the getaway car,” said Iris, popping her head up momentarily over the back of the couch. “But there are more people in the building, and a bunch of them are armed. We tried to get more intel but a bunch of cross chatter burst in, so Aelif’s gone dark. I’m trying to get us a layout, but we are on strictly limited communication.”

Johnny nodded grimly, clearing his throat and gesturing to the room to call for attention. All preparations stopped as everyone waited to hear the next step of the plan.

“Ok everyone--but especially for the new guys--listen up. We are going in with a need-to-know, need-to-say protocol here. No mission-identifiable chatter, no smart mouths, nothing that gives us away. Since we have a man in the field, we’ll hold over many of the same call signs as before. Aelif will still be theta, Iris is tau, Johana is sigma, Kerr is Mu. I’ll stay delta, Boris you’re epsilon and Brynn you’re iota. Jensen stay kappa, Pritchard try lambda.”

“Seems like a lot of work to keep names out of things,” said Pritchard, walking over to sit by Iris, setting up his laptop to start logging in. “Why not just have consistent call signs?”

“Having anonymous yet generic names that we can scramble and abandon has been really useful,” said Boris, strapping on his combat pack. “Trust us. When you’ve been tracked down by a rich, angry, vicious person you stole from, you learn to maintain multiple layers of obfuscation or you die.”

“Dying does seem like a bad idea,” said Jensen, his face carefully neutral. “What else do we need to know?”

“Since we don’t know how much surveillance there will be, we'll stay in pairs.” Johnny started sectioning off teams as he spoke. “Brynn and Boris, you’ll come in from the back. Jensen, you should come in from the top. Johana, you’ll come in with me from the side. Home team, capture every camera and get us as many eyes as you can, and Kerr, get in there astrally. We are sweeping the building for two things: our injured colleague and information we can use to fuck with our targets. We have to assume that they know we are here, and if they don’t know what we're doing, they suspect it. If that’s the case, this might also be a trap.”

The snarky, bantering mood in the room vanished as Johnny laid out the facts. Bags were zipped and buckles fastened as the crew squared up and got ready to go.

“Before we head out, let’s go over three important codes for the new guys.” Johnny held up his fingers to count them down. “Mockingbird formation is when we know we have someone listening, we stop talking altogether, until there is an all clear, or we clear out. Next, if someone is hearing an aria, means we're getting out, drop everything and run. Finally, we can ask how other teams are doing, or report on our own status, by checking on the weather: sunny is all clear, cloudy if there are people around, raining means someone is injured, storming means needing backup because of injury. We know this does not cover all possibilities, things may get confusing. We’re all clever people, we know what we are doing. Any questions?”

Johnny looked over the room, taking the lack of responses as all the sign he needed.

“Ok, everyone. Let’s roll out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: getting shot sucks! I like evil magic and what it does to backgrounds (in a literary sense, it's not like...a fun hobby or something.)


	10. You Can't Be Picky In The Middle Of The Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This night is never ending, but Aelif has found a nest of blood magic, and the team is coming in for back up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I should just make peace with updates. between life and end of quarter code freezes at work and connecting with my beta, it just takes time to get updates out. I then wrote a large scene for the second story in the series (because why write in sequential order when that would make your life easier?)
> 
> I'll probably be taking a break for november, because I'll be NANOing, as will my beta, so *fingerguns*

Aelif watched as the group of hostiles walked past the room he had stowed away in. There were many things he would like to be doing right now, but few options that would be a good idea. He tried to content himself with long-term caution being the wiser and more rational approach.

Too bad he felt like a sitting duck.

Things had been going surprisingly well, too. The attackers from the apartment building had followed him through the streets like men possessed, copying every swerve and stutter, every curve and sway. If he had been actually trying to lose them, it might have been irritating, but as it stood, it was fun as hell. 

He should have known it wouldn’t last.

He led them down dimly lit streets, keeping them in sight through large, darkened windows, never pulling too far ahead. He kept out of populated areas, not wanting to involve pedestrians in the fray. Finally, he was about to turn into the warehouse district, where he was sure he could lose them and make his way back the long way, when the game changed.

An explosion of pain hit his ribs, forcing all the air out of his lungs in a bitten off yelp. He wobbled, nearly losing control of the bike, but he steadied, stubbornness and habit keeping him upright as the edges of his vision grayed. A roaring in his ears drowned out any other sound as he looked down to see a small hole Pritchard’s jacket.

“Theta? Theta! What was that?” Iris’s voice pierced through the pain-filled fog and brought him back to the present, where he was slowing down far too much, and still very wobbly. He took a breath and pushed through the pain, speeding up again.

“Those motherfuckers just shot me,” he said, his voice wavering more than he’d like. Which was to say, at all. And to think, he hadn't even killed any of them. 

He was _pissed_. To think he had gotten _soft_ and let those kids off _easy_. Another shot whizzed by him, and he ducked his head down and leaned into the pain, his rage bubbling over into a snarl. His side flared in agony as he made a sharp left turn onto a narrow side street, ditching his tail for the first time that night.

This whole rescue had hinged on the fact that these kids, these thugs, were breaking in to, _at worst_ , rough up the keyboard jockey, but more likely hold him until he squealed. It fit the M.O. of the Sisters before now, that they weren’t really blood thirsty. Now, it looked like their plans were to _shoot_ the hacker, and Aelif really wasn’t sure what had changed. 

But as the blood dripped down his side, he knew something absolutely had. 

“Theta? What’s happening?” Iris's voice rose. “Can’t cut off on me after something like that.”

“Yeah, driving with a gut wound, little harder than you might think. Gonna duck in someplace, try and patch up, and then I’ll get out of here.” He was fully aware that the sound of his teeth grinding was audible, but he had other things to worry about. 

He zipped through the alley, weaving through dumpsters and trash, picking up speed as he went. His whole strategy had changed: he was looking to hide, rather than been seen. So now he doubled back, looped through a couple of streets, and finally came to a stop beside a warehouse that looked easy to break into. He figured he could stash the bike in the alley next to it, and hole up someplace defensible enough to wait out his pursuers while he figured out how bad his wounds were. 

Aelif hid the bike between some dumpsters in the alley, doing his best to shelter it from view. He also let his disguise melt away as he approached the building. It really wouldn’t do, going to all the trouble of having the hacker escape, only to have him bleed out on camera across town. Aelif would do that with his own face on, thank you very much.

Not that bleeding out was his plan. Just, if it came to that, and those were his options, he knew which one he’d choose.

A heightened stab of pain radiated through his side as he pushed the bike the final inch into the shadows, forcing him to triage his wounds in the filthy alley. Cursing, he stepped back against the wall, unzipped his borrowed coat, and peeled his shirt away from where it had stuck to his side. Getting eyes on it, the wound wasn’t as bad as he expected. It looked like the bullet had winged him, leaving a hole that was seeping blood. Fine for now, but sure to get more annoying as time went on.

He reached into his bag and grabbed gauze and tape, packing the wound enough that it wouldn’t make more of a mess. He fastened the gauze in place, but he really needed more time to make sure the bandage wouldn’t go anywhere, and that required shelter. As he eased his shirt down, he sized up the empty building and planned his route inside. 

Something unknown stopped him from scaling the wall and tucking away in the darkened, open office window above, so he listened to his gut, and looked around with his mage eyes to see if there was anything other-worldly going on.

The building he planned on hiding in was fine. Boring and empty, nothing magical about it. 

The building right across the street was much more interesting.

It was _oozing_ enough magical energy to make Aelif’s skin crawl. It wasn’t so much glowing as it was _seething_ light, _radiating_ heat. He quickly switched back to normal sight in case something looked his way and caught him peeping, but the sheer malevolence of the place almost left an afterimage on his eyes.

Of course he had to go check it out.

Getting there was easy enough, despite his injury. He pulled his hood up and over his face and walked casually across the pavement, keeping an eye out for certain cars that might still be circling. A chain link fence surrounded the property, and long-haul trucks filled a medium sized lot, ready to get packed up first thing in the morning. The fence was tall, with barbed wire on top, but as Aelif kicked the bottom gingerly, he could tell it wasn’t electrified. 

The fence was in bad repair, and he could see places in the back he could easily push through. And if he got through back there, some wooden crates next to the loading ramp would let him climb in through an open window.

He started to walk the perimeter to make his way over. When he got to the back of the building, he had a stroke of luck. Where the garbage bins stood, where the lights were dimmest, there was a dip in the sidewalk and a cut-out in the concrete. It looked like it was meant to help the water flow away from the building in the case of a rainstorm. 

It also looked like it had not been watched as closely as some of the other parts of the fence, and rust had eaten through the brackets of the chain-link. The fence here was fully loose, not even needing to be forced particularly hard. Aelif looked around to make sure there wasn’t an obvious camera on him, then cast invisibility on himself and walked into the shadows. He circled back to the front of the building, and towards the front entrance.

The loading area had enough cargo containers and large wooden crates that he could find shadows deep enough to blend into, and from what he could see, the cameras, while numerous, were regular enough to plan a path with a minimum of disruption, augmenting his stealth as much as possible. Which was great, because the mental weight of maintaining the invisibility spell was unusually difficult. He blamed the general nastiness of the magical background, but it still meant he would have to drop it as soon as he found more stable cover. He couldn’t afford to be careless. Even if Detroit seemed to have a blind spot for magic, this building was quickly reminding him that wasn’t always the case. 

With that level of dark, angry, poisonous energy, he expected to discover a slaughterhouse. But according to labels on the crates and boxes, Universal Upcycling was a steel recycling plant that made machine parts. The loading dock was mostly empty, besides the crates. He walked up the ramp, keeping quiet and listening for guards.

As he got closer to the window he noticed something odd. The window frame glinted in the dim moonlight like it was made of metal. While metal window frames weren’t unheard of, it looked like this one specifically had been polished to a shine.

Weird.

He hauled himself up onto the crate, wincing at the pull on his injured side. The open window gave him a view into the main floor of the plant. Nothing was operational right now, but it looked like there were bins of scrap metal waiting to be melted down and piles of boxes waiting to be loaded up. Large machines sat at rest, and a glowing orange mass from the back, which Aelif assumed to be the forge, waited, too hot to ever truly cool down. There were a couple of lofted offices and side rooms, so he could tuck in there to patch up.

He crept closer, still keeping an ear out, but felt the pit of his stomach drop as he looked closer at the window frame. He knew it had looked strange, but from below he hadn't been able to put his finger on the problem. It was too small to see from a distance. Something was carved into it. Something familiar. 

Something _runic_.

He wiped the bottom edge of the window frame and felt a little spark of latent magical energy ignite where the blood on his fingers connected to the metal. A wave of revulsion washed over him, akin to what he felt when he had looked at the property before but much, much stronger. He jerked his hand back and flipped on his comms link before he could even recover his breath.

“Tau, get delta on the line.” Aelif eased himself down the side of the box and leaned back against it, searching for visible cameras. They shouldn’t be able to see him, but in case they could hear something, he needed to know if he should be running.

Maybe he should be running anyway. This whole place was a nightmare.

“O...kay,” said Iris, sounding confused, but not asking questions. “He’s here, one second.”

There was a small click on the line and Johnny was there.

“Theta, this is delta,” said Johnny, sounding concerned. “What’s happening? Do you need backup?”

“Delta, I found another hive.” Aelif wiped the blood from his hands onto his pants. “I’m in the warehouse district, Franklin and Wodehouse. You’ve got to bring whoever you can down here. There’s so much rotten in here it’s physically unpleasant.”

“Theta, disengage and hole up someplace,” said Johnny, tone brooking no argument. “We’ll be right there, don’t kick the nest before we arrive.”

Which, of course, was when the gates on the perimeter of the loading area opened up, and the cars started coming in.

“Shit!” Aelif ducked down, trying to stay as low as possible. “A whole bunch of cars are pulling in. They’ve cut off my exit.”

So, Aelif, maybe not making the best choice in his life, dived through the window.

What followed was a scramble against the clock as he heard car doors open and people pile out, feet heavy and voices loud. In the middle of the warehouse, he spotted an odd structure: it looked almost like a small three-by-two rectangle of offices, except the bottom row was on stilts, with machine parts running beneath. He ran to the structure, up the three flights of stairs and squeezed through a window sitting ajar, into the office on the end. He was closing it behind him as the garage-style door in the front opened, the building flooding with people. 

“Delta, the hive is now filled with hostiles, and many of them are armed,” said Aelif, before wincing as a bunch of interference came in over the line. “And the line is breaking up. I’ve found a place to hide. Over.”

Nothing came back but weird feedback, so Aelif settled in to wait.

Forty-five minutes later, he still was waiting. He’d long since let his invisibility fade. The building was still full of people, walking past his hiding place,discussing whatever criminal endeavor they were planning at close to midnight on a Saturday. He was getting light headed from blood loss, and was ready to either do something, or stop doing things.

Not that this room left him without tasks. After doing a better job fixing up his wounds, he had spent several minutes looking through papers and carefully not getting too close to the three freestanding storage closets near the far wall. 

From a distance, the only thing unusual about them was that their doors didn't match: the outer ones were single-doored and opened outward, and the one in the center was split down the middle into 2 doors. As he got closer, he saw they were covered with sickeningly familiar inscriptions, just like the circle from Sarif’s basement. He really shouldn’t be poking at things that could absolutely mess him up without some back up, and he definitely did not want to know why when he breathed a little too deeply, he could smell blood that probably wasn’t his.

All perfectly normal things to find in an office. 

But the papers hadn't been very interesting, or at least didn’t have anything that he was going to be able to figure out on his own, so he started looking closer at the closets. He pulled a journal out of his bag to take notes on the very scary and stupid and dangerous magic that was waiting on the other side of the doors. There was something different about these runes. Maybe it was that he was not being chased by a murderous scientist, but the markings at the bottom of this box seemed less passive. It helped that there were twice as many, seemingly working in concert with each other. And they were almost bleeding from onto the closets to the floor, blending into the tiles and then fading into the rest of the room. And, _and_ they were written in a way that made him think there was a lot going on behind the doors.

Which he couldn’t open. _Shouldn’t_ open. But could feel an outside _desire_ to open.

This whole place was viscerally unpleasant.

A muffled thump from outside caught his attention. Had someone just fallen, or were things finally getting interesting? He tapped his earpiece again to see if any noise was coming out of it. Still just weird feedback and...muffled laughing? Was he just really tired?

Better not to dwell on that. 

Aelif hid behind the desk, out of line of sight from the door, ready to attack whatever came through with lethal force. It was past time for him to accept that either the team had been delayed or he had done a bad job tucking himself away and in either case, it might be time to go on the offensive.

The door clicked open, and in flopped a body of an unfamiliar man, unconscious. Aelif popped his head up in confusion, and another body joined the first, gently placed on the ground, before being followed by Jensen entering the room and shutting the door behind him. 

“Oh, it’s you.” Aelif ducked back behind the desk. He just _loved_ being tired and injured in front of strangers. It was the _best_.

“Good to know you're doing fine,” said Jensen, glancing at Aelif with a cocked eyebrow and an otherwise impossible to read expression thanks to his eye shields. “I take it that you haven’t heard _any_ of the comms since we’ve entered the building?”

“I’ve had static since I last talked to Johnny almost an hour ago.”

“That tracks.” Jensen held up a finger. “I’ve got theta here. He’s fine, but you were right delta, lost his voice. I’ll keep him in the loop.”

Aelif bit back the half dozen nasty things he wanted to say at being shushed. He knew at this point he was just being difficult, but didn’t stop the circumstances from chafing.

“What’s the situation out there?” Aelif packed the papers into his bag and eyed the closets again. “I see there are at least two fewer people actively patrolling.”

“Iris and Pritchard locked down the cameras, but not before we got here,” said Jensen, giving the room a once over. “Kerr was going to be giving support remotely via magic, but something about the ‘magical background’ was making it too hard to ‘move astrally’. I assume that makes sense to you.”

Aelif grimaced and nodded. There was a reason he’s been keeping his spellcasting light since he’d gotten here. Even sustaining the invisibility had felt like swimming through pudding. Jensen continued.

“Boris and Brynn tried to circle around back, but Brynn stumbled into something that sounded like one of those… _things_...you found in the basement at Sarif, and she didn’t take it well.”

“What happened?”

“She said it screamed at her, and she burned it alive, which caused more screaming, but also apparently caused some kind of magic feedback loop that knocked her out. She’s fine, but Boris had to carry her out.”

“Shit. Johnny and Johana?”

“Johana triggered a gas leak that took out a majority of the people on the first floor and Johnny has been taking out stragglers to give Boris time to retreat. We think we have most of the building locked down, but it’s hard to say, and since no one could reach you, we’ve been trying to play it careful. Are you fine to get out of here? Place seems to be pretty rough on magic users.”

“It hasn’t been particularly pleasant, but it’s not the worst place I’ve been.” Aelif gestured at the closets. ”And we can’t leave yet. There’s something in those boxes that needs to be taken care of, and I won’t know how to do that until the doors are opened.”

Jensen looked at the closets, then down at the inscriptions that were in the ground in front of them. He then looked over at Aelif with no small bit of skepticism. 

“Are you sure? You did hear the part where I said the thing screamed?”

“I, in fact, did. If it was screaming, then it’s a more than even prospect that it is still alive and feeling pain, which makes us monstrous if we leave it to suffer.”

Jensen sighed and shook his head, but didn’t argue. He looked out the door to the warehouse, before pressing against the wall and getting ready to walk back out. 

“Let me make a sweep around the top here to make sure there aren’t any more hostiles,” said Jensen, tilting his head to the two men on the floor. “If those boxes are as noisy as the one Brynn found, we don’t want to get swarmed. I’ll fill Johnny in while I’m out there. Can you secure these guys?”

“Of course. Did you search them?”

“Just disarmed. Give me ten minutes.”

Jensen slipped out, leaving Aelif with two unconscious bodies to tidy away. Even with the stinging wound in his side, it didn’t take much time. He zip tied them together, but not before thoroughly emptying their pockets. 

It looked like ‘Russell Garza’ worked at one of Tom Major’s scrap shops, if his employee id was anything to go by, which made it interesting that he was wandering around this metal foundry in the middle of the night. ‘Hector Mack’ on the other hand, had a parking pass from a Petrov owned corporate parking garage, though no specific business was listed on it. Neither Major or Petrov were mentioned in the paperwork he had found earlier.

Just more pieces of an increasingly complicated puzzle. 

He didn’t see any obvious augmentations on them, or any comms, which again struck him as odd. A niggling feeling in the back of his head made Aelif check the linings of their collars. He reached the back of Hector’s collar and found a strange pouch in a pocket sewn into his coat. Patting around, he found a similar packet tucked into Russell’s inner jacket pocket.

They were silken bags, about an inch square. They were sewn shut on three sides, and had something heavy within. As Aelif felt through the fabric, there was something sharp almost poking through, thirsty for his blood. He could feel the same heavy sickness from earlier as he held them, and a strange singing seemed to echo in his ears, urging him to look upon them with mage sight and open himself up to be seen.

He dropped both pouches to the ground, surprised when they didn’t make any sound as they landed. He shook his head for a moment, and kicked them towards the desk, away from the bound men and the closets.

The singing didn’t quite stop, but it did quiet down, which was...really less than ideal if Aelif was going to be honest. He put his palms over his ears and tried to listen to his own breathing for a moment to center himself.

When he freed his ears, the room was silent again, except for the breathing of the unconscious men and the movement of circulated air. 

_Maybe it would be wise to wait until the relief team comes back before I start poking at the unknown,_ he thought, rubbing his bottom lip and glancing at the cabinets. _If these are anything like the last one, a few more minutes waiting won’t harm anything._

So, in a move that was mostly wisdom and caution--totally not exhaustion mixed with a little bit of trepidation--Aelif took his place behind the desk and waited for Jensen to return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is written and getting edited, so I can be confident and say: more warning tags will be added! I up my earning of the body horror tag. Jensen has a very bad day. Aelif also has a very bad day. Other people also have very bad days, but they've earned them.


	11. There's A Changing Constellation Of Balls as We Are Playing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jensen and Aelif descend into the blood mages' den and find some unique horrors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! This is actually the third part of the chapter as it was written and it's better now that it is now in three parts. It's just...it took a little longer than anticipated.Also, NANO was a thing. 
> 
> Thanks, as always, to my beta who is my constant reader and most delightful fan. 
> 
> Had to update the tags a bit with this update, but in specific, this chapter has: body horror! memory manipulation! descriptions of wounds! general horror!

Jensen waited at a corner, as the last two hostiles walked closer, clearly nervous and alone in the quiet warehouse. As they drew closer, step by hesitant step, he tensed, ready to surge forward and overwhelm them, hoping for a minimum of damage to both his target and himself.

Mostly his target. None of the hostiles have been particularly dangerous. Their conversations, on the other hand, were fascinating. 

“Have you been able to reach anyone?” said the man on the right, glancing over the railing with a fearful look on his face. “Cause I got nothing.”

“I can’t even get my cell phone to connect,” said the one on the left, scratching his arm. “It’s almost like when I was out at the cannery and that Doctor lady came by to yell at the boss. Except we could still reach people on the links, just the phones went down.”

“I can’t even tell if the links are working. They are so weird.” 

“Yeah, I try not to touch mine. I wish the boss hadn’t gotten involved with those weirdos. Things were a lot easier when we were just moving cars.”

Jensen felt he had heard enough, so he moved in for the strike. With one fluid motion, he reached out and slammed the head of the man on the left into the man on the right, easing them to the ground.

“Delta, pretty sure I’ve got the last couple hornets up here,” said Jensen, as he dragged the two men into an empty office and laid them down. “How’s the bug problem down there?”

“Think we have it all sorted out, though we have our hands full with the clean-up and some recon,” said Johnny, the sound of heavy machinery in the background. “You said theta found another one of those boxes?”

“Yeah, he wasn’t going to leave until we checked it out. Epsilon, how worried should I be?”

“Iota was acting weird as soon as we got into the room,” said Boris, his voice low with worry. “Real jumpy and nervous. Said something about how the whole place felt heavy, like walking through water. What was in the box was horrible, but whatever she saw with her other sight was worse.”

“How’s the weather down there, anyway?”

“I mean, still damp, but there aren’t any storms on the horizon,” said Boris. “You know how rain puts some people to sleep. They just need some time before they wake up.”

“We’ve got the local birds in this area, but iota still said she was hearing strange birdsong all on her own,” said Iris, sounding somewhat distracted. “So, maybe keep your eye out for that. If he’s acting different, there might be something weird going on.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to tell” Jensen gave the warehouse one last look-over. “Ok, on my way back in. I’ll try and keep everyone in the loop, but I have to assume we’ll get the same interference as last time.”

“Good luck, kappa,” said Johnny, as a rumble of a machine grew louder and closer to his location. “If things get too bad, you may need to remind theta there’s a bigger picture here.”

Jensen didn’t respond to that one. He was _sure_ that the person who seemed to be vaguely angry about his presence was going to be thrilled with a ‘gentle reminder.’

So when Jensen made it back to the room where Aelif waited, he was surprised to find the elf waiting patiently, on his knees with papers fanned out in front of him, writing on the ground with some chalk and wearing an expression of stern concentration. As Jensen shut the door, Aelif looked up and nodded, then drew another shape before putting the papers in his bag and standing. The unconscious men were next to him, encircled in the chalk writing, looking just the same as Jensen left them, except now their hands were tied together.

“I take it the floor is clear?” Aelif wiped his hand on his jacket. “Anything I should know about?”

“I feel like I should ask you the same question.” Jensen pointed down at the circle. Aelif shrugged.

“I found some strange charms in their pockets. On the off chance it’s protecting them from whatever is in those boxes, I’m trying to make sure whatever feedback loop you were talking about doesn’t affect them.” Aelif stood up, wincing a little as he stretched his side. “The charms are over by the window. We should take them when we leave.” 

“That makes some sense. Everything outside is good to go.” Jensen frowned at Aelif’s side. “How bad is that? Are you sure we should be taking on these boxes?”

“You said yourself there’s no one else up to it.” Aelif grabbed a knife from inside his borrowed jacket. He balanced it carefully in his right hand as he gave the outer edge of the cabinet’s door frame one last look. “So it’s fine. I had plenty of time to bandage up, and I’ve done harder things with worse. Let’s get on with it.”

“I’m not questioning your abilities. Whatever Brynn saw in the box knocked her out, and she was uninjured and mostly rested going in. You are neither.”

Jensen walked up to where the elf stood, staying behind the imaginary line in the room between Aelif and the inscribed boxes. Aelif glanced back at him and scoffed.

“Brynn is young and undisciplined. She also didn’t know she was likely looking at a flayed, living person. All those are factors working against her.” Aelif faced forward with a determined air. “While this isn’t pleasant, I do unpleasant things often. I’m more worried about you.”

“What?” Jensen returned the scoff with interest. “What do you mean by _that_?”

“I mean,” said Aelif, sounding frustrated, turning to Jensen and letting his knife fall to his side. “You seem like kind of a boy scout. You go out of your way not to hurt people. There’s a large possibility that we’re about to find the living remains of _actual human beings_. I _assumed_ that might upset you.”

“And it doesn’t ‘upset’ you?”

“No. And even if it did, I’ve had time to make peace with it.”

Jensen bit back a sigh as Aelif returned his attention to the boxes, and moved to open the one on the right, hand hovering over the handle. He paused a moment, then glanced over his shoulder at Jensen.

“Actually, you should stand behind something.” Aelif gestured towards the desk with his knife. “I don’t think anything will happen when this opens, but the fewer things in the splash radius, the better.”

Jensen did not step behind the desk, but he did take a couple of steps behind the mage. He darted a look down at the two unconscious men in their chalk circle, and then back at Aelif. 

“Could you make another circle thing?” asked Jensen, pointing to the men tied up behind him. “If it works for those guys, I don’t see why you shouldn't use it again.”

“Not a bad thought, but I’m too much of an active participant, and you have too many augments.” Aelif focused on the cabinet with a shrug. “Let’s be real here. I’m only like sixty percent sure that circle is going to help those guys anyway. But it is the best I have to offer for people who work for blood mages. Killing them might be kinder, but god knows I’m not doing that in here. Who knows what that could set off.”

Aelif placed his hand on the handle of the rightmost cabinet, and something changed. A full body shudder went through the elf as he stood there a moment, staring straight ahead. Aelif then shook his head, twisted the handle, and opened the door. 

Jensen wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw. It took him a moment to see that it was a body in there, because so much of the viscera had been removed from the mass and pinned to the outer edges of the box. There were multiple shelves attached to both the back and front of the cabinet, where large chunks of the body were resting, surrounded by what looked like small railroad spikes carved with symbols. The spikes had wires coming off of them, lining the shelves and sinking into the back of the cabinet. The wires gathered to the top, then ran off into the upper left corner of the cabinet. 

Aelif pushed the door open a little more with the tip of his knife, as if to test how far the connective tissues would stretch. He was muttering something too quietly for Jensen to hear, eyes darting along the shelves, as one of the...appendages? he guessed you would call them?...surged out of its spike circle and took a swipe at him.

Aelif jumped backwards, slicing down with his knife, and cut several long, spindle-like tendrils clean off, letting them fall to the floor. 

“Ok, this one is more lively than the last one.” Aelif warily watched the writhing worm-like bits on the ground. As they squirmed, they dissolved into a plasma and evaporated, like breath in winter. “And it looks a lot less human. It seems like the flesh and organs are on this side, with the brain, liver, stomach, kidneys, lungs, and tentacles all in their own circles. So I’m guessing this other side…”

Aelif opened the left-most door, revealing a cabinet filled with bones: a skull mounted in the center. The rest of the bones were disconnected from each other but wrapped in metal wires, circling out in a radial pattern. Only the arms broke this pattern, reaching outward, grasping towards the open door and the elf, trying to close itself up. 

The wires spiralled around until they gathered in a bundle in the top righthand corner of the cabinet, and fed through a hole in the top, mirroring the other side.

“Wow.” Aelif stepped back and scrutinized both sides, careful not to let either set of arms touch him. “Complete separation of mass. This must have taken forever.”

“You sound impressed.” Jensen rounded the desk and eased forward, keeping his distance but approaching for a closer look. The wires on either side seemed to be bent into some of the runic shapes that he had seen before, if in a slightly more fluid script.

Aelif made a face, like he was disgusted but also couldn’t _really_ argue.

“It is _technically_ impressive.” Aelif shut the doors so the escaping hands would not attempt any further violence. “It’s like running a literal marathon while holding a bucket over your head. It’s morally repugnant, and we have to destroy it, but whoever did it knows what they are doing. However, the really interesting thing will be what’s behind door number three.”

Sticking the knife back into his coat, Aelif placed his hands on the double doors, and opened them without preamble. 

The center cabinet opened to reveal a mostly empty space: all the shelves had been taken out of it. The bundles of wires from from the upper corners of the other two closets entered and snaked down to the floor, curling along the way to form spirals and patterns that looked intentional but not familiar to Jensen. But the largest feature of the closet was the ladder in the middle that led into darkness below.

“Dammit.” Aelif stepped forward and knelt down, grimacing at the sound of the scratching of the hands from the other cabinet. The hole was dark, but Aelif seemed to be trying to see something deep in the darkness. “Can you hear that?”

Jensen leaned forward, craning his neck towards the hole in the ground.

“I hear those appendages and some machinery. That’s it.” Jensen glanced over at Aelif, who wore an intense look of concentration. “I take it you are hearing something else?”

“Yes.” Aelif gritted his teeth, and pushed away from the hole. He rummaged around in his bag and pulled out a glow stick before turning back to Jensen. “Earlier, you said that Brynn said the box’s contents screamed at her. Did anyone else hear it? And was she hearing anything else?”

“I couldn’t hear the screaming over the comms.” Jensen thought back to exactly what had happened. “And she said she was hearing something no one else was picking up on, but she wouldn’t say what it was.”

“Then we don’t have a lot of time.” Aelif cracked the glow stick and secured it to his waist. “Something is desperately trying to get anyone with magic to use it, to open themselves up to whatever is in this hole. I need you to tell Johnny to get out of here as soon as he can. It’s going to start affecting him soon, if it hasn’t already. I’m going to head down and see if I can disrupt this.”

“Is that a good idea?” 

“Probably not. But I’m running low on options, and unless you have learned how to destroy magical installations in the last twelve hours, I’m what we’ve got. Anyway, now that I know there’s some kind of magical compulsion happening, it won’t be an issue.”

“Why not?”

Aelif looked at Jensen with frustrated exasperation, before smoothing his expression to something less scornful. Jensen couldn’t say he appreciated the obvious effort at basic civility, but he’d have to take what he got.

“Because,” said Aelif, his words clipped, as if each was chosen carefully. “I have...experience with magical manipulation, and given enough experience with anything, you learn to recognize the symptoms.”

“How do you know that same ‘compulsion’ isn’t trying to get you to climb into that hole? You had a lot of admiration forvthe ‘craftsmanship’ of this _thing_ just a minute ago.”

“I guess you’ll just have to make that call,” said Aelif, a cruel smile on his face, his eyes narrowing in a mix of mockery and anger. He inclined his head slightly as he backed towards the closet. “Because I’m going down there. You can either stop me, or you can do what I asked and hopefully stop Johnny from walking into the same feedback loop Brynn stumbled into. I’m done explaining myself.”

He didn’t wait for Jensen’s answer before turning and climbing down the hole, quickly disappearing into the darkness. Jensen was torn between doing the smart thing and looping in the rest of the team, and the more satisfying option of following the mage immediately to get the opportunity to prove him wrong.

He intended to contact Johnny, but as the glow sunk down into the depths, the smart choice began to feel a little caustic.

~~

Jensen wasn’t sure how the ladder could possibly have been that long, but he must have descended three stories before he caught up to the sickly light of the cracked glow sticks. 

“Watch your head, ceiling is lower right when you step off,” came Aelif’s voice from the bottom of the ladder, beyond a faint silhouette of a doorframe sketched in darkness. He nearly continued, stopped, then started again, clearly wrestling with the right thing to say. “Also brace yourself. It’s bad in here.”

Jensen hesitated a moment, not letting go of the ladder, thinking of the two boxes upstairs. 

“Should I go get more backup?” asked Jensen as the smell of flesh, blood, and something ashy and burnt wafted past him. 

“Can't spare the time,” said Aelif. “I assume you got a hold of Johnny?”

“Yeah, he and Johana are circling the wagons.” Jensen stepped off the ladder and ducked into the room. 

Intellectually, Jensen had known it would be weird, but he hadn't known just how over the absolute batshit it was going to be. He tried to find a detail to focus on so he could comprehend the whole, because the full tableau was so overwhelmingly vile. 

The room was fifteen foot square, with some chairs in the corner, and a laptop sitting plugged in and neglected on a small podium. There were a couple dim lights, and some air vents, but nothing to distract from the abomination on the far side of the room. 

It looked as if a wall and a quarter of the floor had been replaced with circuitry, but instead of metal and solder, the engineer used tendons and bone. Wires still glittered, but organs were pierced, weakly fluttering as veins and arteries moved blood and other fluids around, heating and cooling components and sigils in turn. A terrible amalgamation of metal and flesh, oozing and pulsing in the dim light.

And right in front of it, sat Aelif, writing calmly in a notebook, two knives plunged into the mass in front of him. Aelif looked up to the ceiling, bobbing his head as he counted across, before picking the left knife up, and stabbing it a half foot to the right.

Almost as one, three voices screamed from within the mass. Aelif quickly pulled the knife back out with a muttered curse, and rubbed the back of his forehead with his knuckles. He looked down at his notebook, and pushed the knife another six inches to the left. This time the wall was silent.

“What was _that_?” said Jensen, searching the wall for the source of the screaming. 

“I’m trying to take this apart in the most advantageous and speedy way possible,” said Aelif, writing some notes down and tapping his pen on the paper. “Believe it or not, I don’t usually spend my time unravelling crimes against good sense in the middle of hostile territory. I'm working as fast as I can.”

“Can’t you just smash this up?”

“Because that went so well for Brynn?” Aelif leaned back and squinted at the wall, grimacing at the size of it. “There’s no place here for brute force. For one thing, there could be traps, and I’m trying very hard not to spring them.”

“What about that console over there?” Jensen tilted his head over to the corner with the laptop in it. “Is that doing anything?”

Aelif looked over to the corner and furrowed his eyebrows, before looking up at the ceiling and back at the wall.

“Maybe? It would be weird, but not the strangest thing I’ve seen this week. It looks like there are some wires connecting it to the mass, but I have no idea how to check on it. I’m terrible with computers.”

“I will see what I can do” Jensen walked over to the podium and connected with the computer. “I have some follow-up questions, but they can wait.”

“Gee, thanks mister boy scout,” said Aelif, in a mocking tone. “I’m _sure glad_ I don’t have to answer your questions while I’m trying to figure this out. It’s _awful_ generous of you.”

Jensen rolled his eyes, but quickly moved on to gaining access to the terminal. The laptop didn’t seem to be networked to anything outside the room, but it had a strange user interface like nothing Jensen had ever seen. It wasn’t hard to get past the lock screen, but once he was in, what exactly he was looking at still didn’t make sense. It was a three dimensional representation of the room he was in, yet the wall of weird fleshy bits was broken apart, with pieces that could be dragged and dropped into place.

A couple of the pieces were already in place, and as Jensen moused over one of them, the corresponding area of the wall pulsed with an unnatural life. 

“What are you doing?” Aelif stood, eyes blazing, his hands pressed over his ears. “Can you not _hear_ that?”

“Obviously not. What’s happening?”

“It sounds like you’re tossing a pile of silverware into a blackboard grinder.” Aelif looked around the room as though trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Jensen moved the cursor, and Aelif relaxed, dropping his hands from his head. He scowled at Jensen and stalked over to the podium. “Just...let me see what you are doing.” 

Jensen moved over, and Aelif looked at the screen, his lips a flat line as he took in what was on the screen. He looked up at the wall, then back at the screen, and his expression became puzzled.

“Did you find it like this?” Aelif pointed to the sections on the screen that corresponded to the wall. “Were these three sections in place?”

“Yes. I didn’t move anything but the cursor.” 

Aelif hummed and stepped towards the flesh wall, pulling another knife from someplace around his lower back. 

“I’m going to try something, tell me if anything changes on the screen.” Aelif looked down at the floor and about six feet to the left of where they were standing. Then, with careful aim, he stabbed his knife into the floor, at the approximate center of the room.

On the screen, a two minute timer popped up, and started to count down.

“Uh, Aelif? We’ve got a counter. Two minutes.” Jensen tried to get the computer to respond in some way to the keyboard, but something was overriding his input.

“Shit. Does this do anything?” Aelif wedged the knife up, dislodging a small metal panel, revealing a pulsing heart pierced with wire and piping. He reached in and pulled out a couple of wires and turned to Jensen with a hopeful look.

The timer stopped. Jensen nodded, and the mage relaxed, slipping the knife away wherever it came from. Aelif stood and stretched, then walked back to the podium and looked at the timer. It had stopped at twenty three seconds. Aelif’s expression went from relieved to worried.

“What’s wrong?” Jensen stared at the screen.

“This timer hasn’t disappeared? It just stopped?” 

As Aelif asked his question, a window popped up, reading “Unorthodoxy Detected: Releasing Memetic Suppression - Error Code: 99876562.”

“ _Shit!_ ” Aelif spat and sprung into action. He threw himself at Jensen, spinning around and pushing him to the ground. As Jensen hit the floor, he saw a slightly shimmering wall start to form around them. 

Unfortunately, it did not form fast enough to protect them from the flash of blinding energy that filled the small room, electrifying and deafening in turns. All Jensen heard as everything faded to white were his own screams mingling with the mage's as they echoed around the metal room.

~~

_Time slowed down in weird ways, as he watches his life ending. Sitting in the ruined mess of wires and metal that were once the computers that Megan and her team had been using to create the next stage of human evolution, all Adam could think about was that he never thought he’d be hit by someone who actually hit like a truck._

_Given that the guy then threw him through a bulletproof wall, the force comparison probably equaled out. They’d have to review the tapes._

_He also wasn’t sure every bone in his body was broken yet, so maybe it was 4/5ths of a truck. Because in Adam’s mind, the man was moving like a glacier, stalking towards him with purpose._

_That’s weird though, he would have sworn he couldn’t feel his legs breaking, but the weight of the shards from the computer display began to tear through his ruined flesh, and he could feel each cut like a thousand tiny knives--_

“Wake up.”

_He pulls his arm holding his gun up, but the glacier man bats it away like he was a kitten. Then he’s lofted into the air, and he can’t breath. There isn’t any air. Things are going dark._

_But then here comes Megan, with a barrel of battery acid and she throws it, and…_

_Wait._

_Now he’s on the ground, but Megan’s being pinned. There’s the barrel of acid. The one she'd thrown at him, but now the man hurls it at her instead. She screams._

_She’s screaming. She’s screaming. She’s screaming._

_She falls next to him, melted, bloody, and raw, and reaches out, grabs at a gun, and fires. It hits him in the head, just above his eye._

_This wasn’t how it happened._

“Goddamn it, Jensen, wake up.”

_He’s lying on the table, and they’re about to cut off his legs. They’re ruined. Mangled._

_Megan is here, talking to David, still half-dissolved and covered in blood. He can’t hear her words, but he can see how much the blood bubbles and foams as she speaks._

_It’s grotesque. No one notices._

_David nods, seeming to take it in. He turns to the surgeons and tells them to start._

_The saws start whirling, but Adam is still awake. Why is he awake? Why can’t they see that he’s awake?_

_He tried to scream, but Megan places a hand over his mouth._

“Adam Jensen, you have to wake up!”

Jensen’s real eyes flew open to see Aelif, ten inches away from his face, holding Jensen's head in his hands, a look of worry and panic painted plainly over his features. Jensen's eye shields had retracted, and as he made eye contact with Aelif, the other man let his hands fall from Jensen's face with a small, pleased smile. The open look of relief on Aelif’s face was unexpected, and disappeared as quickly as it had come, as the mage leaned back on his hands.

“What happened?” Jensen sat up carefully as Aelif shifted away, bringing up his HUD to check for internal damage. His internal systems were showing _something_ had just happened, as his body was flooded with cortisol, adenosine and for some reason _troponin_. But there wasn’t a toxin detected, wasn’t a physical explanation, it was just anomalous. “I was having a nightmare, but--”

“It wasn’t quite right?” finished Aelif, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand as he looked at the ceiling. He was drenched with sweat, looking almost as shaken as Jensen felt. “It was a nasty boobie trap. It knocks people out and forces them into progressively worse versions of their memories. Gets bad enough to give someone a heart attack. Even if you break out, it’s exhausting. But it has one major weakness.”

“What is that?”

“It’s less effective against people who have had terrible lives,” said Aelif, with a rueful smile tugging on his lips. Jensen barked a surprised laugh as Aelif stood and offered Jensen a hand up. As the aug got to his feet, he could feel everything become a bit more ‘real’, even with the pulsing mass of flesh taking up half the room. 

“In the spirit of honesty,” continued Aelif, turning towards the wall to survey the situation, pointedly _not_ looking at Jensen, his face blank. “I’m sorry about whoever Megan is.”

Jensen gave Aelif an alarmed look.

“You said her name while you were under.”

“Oh,” said Jensen, redeploying his eye shields self-consciously and looking away. “She was a doctor killed in the attack at Sarif. We...she and I used to--”

“I understand complicated. I don’t need details.” Aelif held up a hand to cut Jensen off. “I didn’t mean to pry. It just didn’t seem fair.”

Jensen stood in silence as Aelif knelt down to gather the things scattered on the ground. His systems were all leveling off, repairing any minor internal damage. He shook his head slightly, trying to dislodge the memory of Megan melting from behind his eyelids.

It had seemed so real. But it obviously wasn’t.

He was beginning to really _hate_ magic.

“Are you ready to leave?” asked Aelif, exhaustion playing at the corners of his eyes. He was shaking his hands and bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.

“Wait, what about the wall?” Jensen looked at the valves and organs, and they were still pumping slowly, methodically, unnaturally. Just like they had been when he'd first dropped in. “We aren’t just leaving it, are we?”

“Of course not.” Aelif winced as he stretched his side. “But taking it down is going to be an ‘on the go’ sort of a deal, so you’ve got to be ready to run. I figured out how to feed the destructive power back to the source, so I’m going to break this thing open, and let its maker’s deal with it. It will put these poor bastards to rest, and ruin the chances of this monstrosity being used again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Aelif scrunched up one side of his face and shrugged a little. “Mostly sure. I suppose dropping a grenade after us would not be overkill.”

“Why aren’t we just doing that first?”

“Well, I know a grenade won’t do it on its own. There’s something too sophisticated holding the whole thing together. If I don’t loosen it up, it will just keep chugging along, and overloading it either magically or physically might just make this place inaccessible. If I crack it open, it will _take_ the damage hopefully and share it’s experience with the whole class.”

“Anything I should know? I’d rather not get blindsided again.”

Aelif looked at him with a measuring gaze, and sighed. 

“I forget this is not typical for you. Sorry. So, to crack things open I’ll have to concentrate. It will be quiet and boring and I’ll move my hands a bit, but you shouldn’t see much. Some things might break, but nothing too dire. The _next_ part however, will be big and obvious. It will look like...I think it looks like a watery fireball to people who can’t interact with magic? I don’t remember. Anyway, I’ll hit this thing a couple of times, and hopefully I won’t pass out.”

“Ok, walk me back to the passing out part, that seems important.”

“Short version, magic takes energy. If you don’t successfully pull it from the environment, it will take it from your body, and there’s always a chance it will take more than you have to give.”

“Do you think it’s _likely_ you’re going to pass out?”

“If you’d asked me before we triggered that trap? No. Now? Still probably not, but there’s a slight possibility. Maybe not worth mentioning, but you wanted to not be blindsided.”

“Appreciated. And after that?”

“Quick exit. I’m not sure how stable this room will be, and I think any serious recon might trigger more defenses. We retreat, and any destruction on the way out is great. Encouraged even.”

Jensen stepped back to look up the ladder. There was still a clear view to the top, and no real way to make the way easier. He placed himself near the ladder, out of what seemed to be Aelif’s working area, but within easy access to the escape.

“Ok, sounds like you have it all thought out. I’ll wait for your signal.”

Aelif looked like he was going to say something, thought better of it, nodded, and faced the wall of flesh. He stood with his palms out and his hands about shoulder width apart, gaze fixed in the middle distance. As he stood, some of the wires and tubes began to vibrate, as if they were under a terrible strain. 

He swept his hands to the right, and the mass surged rightward, as if the whole chunk of flesh was being pushed by forces unknown. He reached out, grabbed at something, and it was like a guitar string had been plucked, but silently: just the tension and the vibration ringing through the air. 

Suddenly, a piece of metal ripped off the wall and sailed across the room, embedding itself in Aelif’s leg. If the mage noticed, he didn’t react to it. He pushed his hands together, and an inhuman scream echoed from the walls of the room, reverberating through Jensen’s bones.

Jensen was beginning to realize that he and Aelif had wildly different definitions of “boring.”

To Aelif’s credit, the second phase was much flashier. Aelif lifted both hands over his head, and a large blue and white ball of energy formed. With a snarl, he flung the ball into the center of the wall. As it hit, the energy spread, filling in all the little cracks and crevices with trailing bolts of slippery blue power. With barely a pause, Aelif flung another ball, this one hitting a little left of center. As this one connected, the flesh beneath ignited, quickly making the transformation from blue to red-hot flame as the energy transitioned from the etheric realm to the very material one.

Aelif lifted his hand one more time, but at this point his leg gave up the ghost. He fell to his knee with a hiss, grasping the jagged metal that was lodged in his thigh. Jensen stepped forward to assist, keenly aware that the temperature was rising every second.

“It’s...deep…” Aelif pushed at the metal, hands red with the blood oozing around the wound. He shuddered and braced his hands against the floor. “We should...go. I’ll...make do.”

“Don’t be reckless.” Jensen grabbed Aelif’s upper arm. Aelif looked at him with slightly dazed eyes, pain and exhaustion written plain on his face. “Let me help you, and we can get out of here.”

Without waiting for Aelif’s response, Jensen scooped up the other man under the armpit and made a beeline for the ladder. They hurried as they were able, and Jensen helped him up onto the ladder first, kind of a tripod hobble to make it up the shaft. Jensen followed closely behind, ready to catch Aelif if he stumbled. 

It took more time than was comfortable with the raging inferno growing beneath them, but eventually they reached the top, Aelif pulling himself clear and Jensen a couple of steps behind him.

“-got some rumbles happening, delta. Should we make another pass?” crackled Iris's voice over the Infolink as Jensen stood. Whatever interference had been present in the room before had been severely weakened, if not broken.

“Delta, I’m here with theta,” said Jensen, looking down at Aelif, who was resting his head on his knee, stretching his injured leg. The climb hadn’t done him any favors, but he didn’t look like he was going to pass out. “What have we missed?”

“Kappa!” said Johnny, sounding both surprised and relieved. “The locals have been introduced to some alternate entertainment, and are thoroughly engrossed. How’s the weather where you are?”

“Some pretty heavy rain, but no storms yet. Any new weather patterns out there?”

“Should be clear sailing no matter which way the wind blows you,” said Iris, as a wet tearing sound came from behind him. Jensen turned to see Aelif dropping the metal shard onto the floor, one hand holding the wound closed, a selection of medical supplies laying on the ground ready to be applied. “Just give us an idea of the general currents, and we’ll make sure you get caught up in a sweep.”

“Understood. I’ll let you know.” Jensen turned to Aelif with a confused tilt of his head. “Did you want a hand with that?”

“No.” Aelif grabbed a hypospray, bit the cap off, and injected it into the wound, letting the foaming material cover and fill the seeping flesh. As it dried, it stopped the blood, creating a tacky bandage that covered everywhere he sprayed. With brutal efficiency, Aelif, slapped a bandage on the drying compound, ripping open more of the cloth around the injury to secure the bandage with tape. He used some of the wrapping to scoop up the metal, the cap, and a glob of tacky spray and drop it in his bag, sweeping up the rest of the detritus with a grunt. He glanced at Jensen with a disdainful scowl, and carefully pulled his knee up, testing the bandage. As he winced, he held up a bloody hand. “I suppose you could help me up.”

“I mean, if you don’t think that would hurt your pride,” said Jensen, obliging. 

Aelif pulled himself up, still heavily favoring the injured leg but standing on his own. “It’s not pride.” Aelif gritted his teeth as he centered his bag on his back and tightened the straps. “I just...look. It’s not you, I just don’t like it when other people touch me, ok? I do my best to avoid it.”

“You’re not selling this ‘not pride’ thing.” Jensen peered out the door at the factory floor, plotting a route down. “How much strain will that take?”

“I’d prefer not to rappel out of here, and I can’t say I’ll be spry, but I should be decently mobile.” Aelif pulled a bottle of pills out of a side pocket of his bag and swallowed them. “Full on sprinting might be an issue, anything slower than that will be fine.”

“Ok.” Jensen reconnected to his Infolink. “Delta, I think this weatherfront is blowing out. Where should we take shelter?”

“Go to the postmodern racetrack where theta first landed, and we’ll be right there,” said Johnny, accompanied by the sound of people in the background hopping into action. ”And kindly tell theta to stop poking at things, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Yeah, I’m sure my _telling him that_ is going to stop him.”

Jensen turned back to Aelif, who was walking toward the window with an unsteady step, waving his hands over the floor with a look of concentration. Jensen was beginning to recognise that look as spellcasting, but he wasn’t sure what was so important about the ground. Once Aelif reached the wall, he picked up the charms from before and slipped them in his bag, and turned back to Jensen expectantly.

“You’ve been asked not to poke at anything else.” Jensen looked at Aelif’s bag. Aelif shrugged.

“Fine by me. These don’t count, I poked at them before. I’m just finishing a poke I started earlier.”

“I’m not sure I agree, but whatever.” Jensen glanced out the window. “We’re supposed to go to a postmodern racetrack? You’ll supposedly know where that is.” 

“Oh, yeah. Office building down the street.” Jensen turned to him with such a look of utter bafflement, that Aelif sighed, and traced out the path with his finger. “Cube jockey to cubist. Cubist to postmodern. Jockey to where a jockey races. It’s like rhyming slang, a step off of what you’re referencing. In any case, it’s over by where I left your coworker’s bike.”

“That’s so needlessly contrived. Is everything a code?”

“No. Some things are just lies.” Aelif walked towards the door, only a slight limp betraying his injured leg. “I think I’m good. We should leave before the explosion anyway.”

“What explosion?” Jensen put his hand up to stop the other man, but Aelif sidestepped with surprising agility considering his injury.

“Oh, that room is absolutely going to explode. Too many gas pipes and the like connecting things. We don’t want to be onsite when it does.” Aelif pulled up his hood and stepped into the main room, dropping his voice and moving briskly. “People will have _questions_. Coming, boy scout?”

Jensen briefly considered throwing something heavy at the smug form retreating in front of him, but decided instead to keep his mouth firmly shut and focus on getting out of there. It wasn't as if everything _else_ the mage had done wasn’t annoyingly difficult or anything. Might as well add one more to the list.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, for those of you that don't have this knowledge at your fingertips, cortisol, adenosine and troponin are the hormones that are in your system after a heart attack. *jazzhands*
> 
> The next chapter is in the works! ~murder~ and ~spirit combat~ as well as ~things going terribly wrong~.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	12. Moving At the Speed of Sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tensions rise as there's a little spirit shaped hiccup on the way out of the factory.

It was properly dark as the two men made their way through the pacified factory. The lack of people patrolling didn’t mean they could let their guards down: this was no time to get sloppy just because the end of the night was in sight. So while they hadn’t seen anyone, they watched their backs and kept to the shadows.

However, mused Jensen, it was a good thing they met no resistance as they escaped the factory because it was clear Aelif was barely keeping himself upright. Unfortunately for Aelif’s seemingly overblown sense of pride, his teammates had done a great job clearing out the factory, and Jensen’s full attention was focused on him on the way out. 

Sure, the mage kept his feet, and did a great impression of someone who was fully alert. But the ritual in the bowels of the factory had obviously worn on him. Whatever patch job he had slapped together on his leg had not done much for the pain Aelif was obviously feeling, as he limped more and more as they got closer to the exit. While slowing the mage down a little might help with the injury, Jensen wasn’t sure if calling attention to it was the best strategy. 

But if there was one thing his compatriot seemed to have a weakness for, it was detailed explanations. A little distraction might slow him down so he didn’t damage his leg in a more serious way.

Also, Jensen was curious about a couple of things that didn’t quite add up.

“So, after all that delicate work down in the hole, why rig everything to explode?” Jensen watched Aelif catch himself mid-stumble. “Seems like it might have been useful to bring someone else down there to look at those markings.”

Aelif glared over his shoulder. “My notes will to have to suffice,” he said, rolling his eyes and walking around a large box that jutted from under a piece of machinery. “Once the feedback loop reaches the creators of that abomination down there, I’d really prefer their allies not be able to sift through the wreckage for clues. I’m good at covering my tracks, but if it were me? And my co-conspirator dropped dead in the middle of the night? I would scour the rubble for every scrap of information. This factory will be the first place they’ll check.”

Jensen stopped dead in his tracks as he processed what Aelif said.

“Wait, what did you say?”

“The factory? There are a lot of unconscious people inside. It's the first place they'd check even without an explosion.” Aelif continued walking, oblivious to the delay

Jensen caught up and grabbed his shoulder. Aelif started, then looked at Jensen’s hand, then up at his face with hard eyes.

“No, I mean the dropping dead part,” said Jensen, his gravelly voice flat and serious. “Did you kill someone?”

“Yes, unless I really messed up, which is unlikely.” Aelif pulled his shoulder away with a wince. He backed up a step, shifting his weight into a more defensive posture. “More than one person, if we’re lucky.”

“How?” Jensen resisted the urge to close the gap and shake him for details. “ _When?_ ”

“Look,” hissed Aelif, still backing up slowly, as if he unsure if Jensen would lash out. “This is why I didn’t say what I was doing while we were there. I knew you would freak out. It had to be done, end of story.”

“What do you mean, end of story? There was no _start_ of the story to end!”

“I don’t hav—“

The floor rocked with a muffled explosion, throwing Aelif off balance. He lurched back, flinching as he slammed into a large metal machine. Aelif bared his teeth and hissed in a breath as he curled into himself, defensiveness dropped momentarily. 

“Was that the explosion we were expecting?” Jensen searched for any signs of structural instability. “It seemed closer than I expected.”

“No.” Aelif pushed away from the machine with some effort, his eyes scanning the room. “We should have had an hour at least. This is something else. We need to move faster.”

“Then you’re going to have to accept some help.”

“Fuck. Off.” Aelif balled his hands into fists, glaring at Jensen with increasing venom. “I’m not taking performance tips from a glorified rental cop with a hero complex. I’ll be fine.”

“It’s increasingly clear you don’t know what ‘fine’ means to a normal person. Don’t make me hurt you to get us out of here.”

“I seem to remember you didn’t come out on top of this last time, boy scout.”

“You weren’t about to fall over last time, sparky.”

“Don’t make me regret saving your life, yo--” Aelif’s eyes flickered up to something behind Jensen, and his face went on a journey: shock, fear, determination, and then back to anger. These emotions made a quick trip across his face as he refocused on Jensen. He adjusted his stance slightly, and looked the Jensen straight in the eye with a burning intensity.

“Jensen. I need you to trust me, and I know this sounds like a trick, but you have to believe me. When I say ‘now’, hit the deck. Do it, and I’ll do whatever you say, I promise. No time to explain. Count of three, got it?”

“What are you--”

“No time! Three, two, one, _now!_ ”

Jensen dropped to the floor just in time to feel a burst of heat and static rush past.

Any relief Jensen might have felt from dodging Aelif's wave of magic was quickly overtaken by the sight of a large, black, solid object barreling into Aelif, knocking him ten feet backwards. 

Jensen sprang to his feet as the dark mass rolled back, growls and grunts echoing in the otherwise quiet factory floor. Flashes of white and grey mixed with inky blackness tumbled together until they stopped with a thump, the large animal-like creature slamming Aelif into the ground with a thump. As Jensen rushed towards them, almost as in slow motion, the creature raised a claw-like hand to swipe at the mage’s head. 

Aelif raised a glowing fist to the creature's chest.

The flash of light was blinding even behind Jensen’s eyeshields, stopping him in his tracks as he rapidly blinked to clear his vision. After long seconds of blindness, Jensen looked down to see Aelif curled on his side, eyes squeezed shut. 

“Aelif?” Jensen took a step forward.

Aelif cracked an eye. With obvious effort, Aelif uncurled from the tight ball he had ended up in and looked at Jensen with unfocused eyes. He coughed quietly before taking a deep, shuddering breath.

“What was that?” Jensen asked.

“Manifested spirit.” Aelif pushed himself into a sitting position. Jensen knelt to help him, and it said a lot about how much Aelif was hurting that he just sat there staring into the middle distance. “They’re damage sponges. Magic’s th’best way to hurt’em.”

“Best way?” Jensen searched Aelif for obvious injuries, but it was hard to tell without taking off the bulky coat. “But not only way?”

Aelif looked at him with something approaching humor, underneath the exhaustion.

“I know y’have firepower under there, but I don’t think y’hiding a tank.” Aelif''s words slurred together as he rubbed his face. “It was prob’ly an alert or a trap that sprang when one of those... assholes died. We need t’go. Might b’more and it’ll be hard to stop another.”

“Ok, then let me help you up.” Jensen met Aelif’s curled lip of disgust with a calm smile. “Hey, I hit the deck. You have to do what I say.”

Aelif sighed, but he didn’t argue. As they stumbled to their feet, the Aelif’s hand dug into Jensen's back, his breath coming out in one long hiss of pain. Jensen glanced down to see that the wound in Aelif’s leg was open, dripping, and now filled with all the grit and detritus of the factory floor. Aelif planted his hands on Jensen’s chest as if he was going to push away before dropping his forehead onto Jensen’s shoulder with a ‘thunk’.

“Fuck--me, that hurts,” Aelif muttered under his breath, directly into Jensen’s chest, obviously not expecting a response. 

“Not the time or the place, sparky.” Jensen’s answer was out of his mouth before he could stop it.

Aelif shoved back from Jensen’s chest, peering up with incomprehension written all over his face. Jensen sighed and tried again, this time helpfully.

“You got hit really hard, your leg is a mess, and we have to move quickly. I’m going to carry you. Is there anything I need to know?”

Something flickered across Aelif’s eyes, but it was too quick for Jensen to get a good read. If he didn’t know better, he would have called it fear, but that didn’t make sense. Before Jensen could follow up, Aelif shielded his eyes with his hand and groaned, shaking his head slightly as though trying to clear it.

“I dunno.” Aelif's voice shook. “It's usually not so hard to stay conscious. I’m having a hard time giving you an accounting.”

“Ok, that’s it, we’re going. I’m trusting you to stop me if I make things worse.”

It took a little trial and error, but soon Jensen had an arm under Aelif’s legs, and the other under the mage's shoulder blades. Aelif crossed his arms awkwardly, holding himself tightly as if he could somehow lift himself out of Jensen’s hold. Despite his best efforts, however, he remained subject to gravity. He grimaced at Jensen and nodded, signaling his readiness to go.

Jensen took one last look behind them, and without another word darted into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *fingerguns* Yeah, once a month updates are cool, yeah? Well, the next part is tricky, and I've had to draw action maps. I personally want to thank every shadowrun campaign that has left their websites up from the mid 2010s so that I can go check games stats. I mean, I threw almost all of them out, but it was nice to look.
> 
> Thanks for reading, hope y'all still like it.


	13. Hid in the Dark of Their Windows Til They Passed and Left Us Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Close call after close call finds Jensen pinned down in an office building, a heavily wounded mage in no condition to help, taking out hostile gunners while they wait for backup.

The route from the factory to the office building started unremarkable. Jensen stuck to the shadows, because while there was no obvious sign of opposition, it would be stupid to assume none existed. With his hands full, his options for response would be limited.

Despite Jensen’s best efforts to keep his gait smooth, something changed while they traveled. Subtly, the tension in Aelif’s form ratcheted up moment by moment, until Jensen could feel that every muscle in the other man’s body was tense enough to tear, but he couldn’t figure out _why_. Even Aelif's neck craned, curling away from Jensen’s stabilizing arm. 

“Am I hurting you?” Jensen asked, as quietly as possible, trying to see if there was a way he could make things more comfortable. Aelif shook his head tightly, the teeth biting into his lip belying his gesture. 

If speed weren't so vital, maybe Jensen could have stopped, but there wasn’t time. He had to take Aelif at his word.

As Jensen navigated the shadows of the parking area, jumping over the fences with quiet ease, he could feel the mage’s shallow breathing speed up, nearly hyperventilating. Aelif buried his face further into his borrowed jacket, muffling himself, but it was unclear if he was trying to hide the sound or calm his breathing.

Either way, Jensen almost stopped despite their rush. But they were so close to the rendezvous point: if nothing else, it would be easier to defend than some random street out in the open.

Finally, Aelif’s breathing smoothed out; after crossing the street, Jensen looked down to see Aelif was no longer conscious, head slumping into Jensen’s chest. Aelif's arms slackened, and fortunately they caught before they flopped down, or Jensen would now be juggling his now sack-like burden. 

“God dammit.” Jensen scanned the building, trying to find a good place to hole up until their ride got there. An open window on the second floor looked large enough to jump through, but who knows what was waiting inside. There might be something closer to the ground in the back.

He froze at a screech of tires. It sounded like it had come from the far side of the alley he'd been about to walk down. It could be a coincidence. 

Sure, and it was a coincidence when lightning struck the same place twice. That didn’t make it a good idea to go dancing around the spot with a metal umbrella covered in water. He would observe this crazy random happenstance from the safe distance of that second floor window.

With one quiet leap they were inside, albeit with the counterpoint of a pained whimper from the unconscious mage. Sure enough, the car was full of people who had clearly come to make trouble and it was quickly followed by back-up.

“I’m going to go take a closer look at how bad this is,” said Jensen, checking Aelif over to see if there was any new bleeding to explain the loss of consciousness. There wasn’t anything obvious. “Not that I’m expecting an answer, I guess. Shit.”

Jensen scanned the empty office for a place Aelif wouldn’t be seen, but also wouldn’t panic if he woke up. While the standing closet was tempting, Jensen opted for the foot space under the desk in the center of the room. No one should be able to see him from the door, and if he woke up, he could make his way out easily. 

Jensen made sure Aelif's airways weren't blocked, but there wasn’t much else he could do. Jensen hadn't thought he would miss being snarked at, but as he turned to check on the car of hostiles, the silence was deafening.

But like seemingly everything else tonight, it didn’t last long.

“Kappa, we’re almost there. Are you secure?”

Jensen tried very hard not to sigh. It wasn’t Johnny’s fault that things had gone from pear-shaped to...whatever was worse than pear-shaped.

“Delta, we’re just above the postmodern racetrack, but we’ve got company.” Jensen thought he'd managed to keep his frustration out of his voice, but it had been a long night. “Hostiles have pinned us down. Theta is unusually quiet, and it’s concerning.”

“I understand that being the go-between is a hassle-”

“Not the kind of quiet I’m talking about.” Jensen ducked into a nearby conference room, trying to get a better look at the group that had entered the office building. 

The room had internal windows that looked over the inner lobby, making it a prime location to spy without being seen. Six heavily armed people had come out of the first car, but Jensen heard a second vehicle close enough that he couldn’t disregard it. “We got hit by something on the way out, and he’s been in and out of consciousness. Currently out.”

“Oh.” Johnny lapsed into silence, not exactly inspiring confidence. After several seconds, he continued. “Understood. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

That was...something.

When he'd left Aelif behind to scope out the incoming men with assault rifles, he knew that he’d have to work fast. Getting the update from Johnny, well didn’t change his plans. It just meant whatever was happening with the mage was potentially a known quantity.

There would be time to ask questions later. He’d add this to the list.

“Ok, everyone,” came a voice from below, just at the range of his augmented hearing. “If whoever wrecked the boss’s installation is here, they’ve got to be messed up.”

“How do we know they're here?” said a younger voice.

“Because Doc Wilson said to check here first,” said the leader, his tone brooking no arguments. “And people who question the doc end up featuring in installations. Boss wants them alive, but doesn't much care how alive that is. We’re looking for a mage, don’t care about any muscle, but we’ll take in whoever to make up for damages. Doc is _pissed_.”

“I thought the doc got hit.” said one of the other voices, a younger man by the sound of it. “How’s she still walking around?”

“Naw, Gene. The lawyer and his wife went down,” said a third voice, gruffer, more tired. “Keeled over in the middle of a meeting. I heard Doc figured out what happened and called the boss.”

“Cut the chatter,” said the leader, all business. “We can gossip on the way back. Until we have the mage in custody, keep your guard up. The doc sent something nasty after them, and they should be pretty injured, but they broke into the factory and took out something major, so they’re no slouch. This is no time for dicking around. Everyone, spread out and check rooms. Radio in if you find anything. Understood?”

General murmurs of assent were followed by pairs of people splitting off to search. Jensen kept his eyes trained on the pair that were bypassing the main floor altogether and starting their search on floor two, near the room Aelif was in. Taking those two out quickly would buy some time.

“Kappa, I’m seeing some horseplay at the racetrack.” Johnny’s voice crackled in Jensen’s ear as he moved to the hallway door. “Do you need us to do some clean up?”

“I’m seeing what I can do about a couple of troublemakers, delta, but help with the rest would be appreciated.” Jensen left the conference room, and made his way into the hall. “There’re two hostiles a little too close for comfort. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Wait, is theta with you?”

“No, I stashed him under a desk. I’ll circle back once I take care of these two.”

“Oh.” Johnny left the line silent for a strangely long time, long enough that Jensen guessed he was having some kind of conversation with the other people in the car. Just before Jensen broke back in, Johnny continued. “Let me know when you’re heading back to theta’s position. We’re better rested, we can handle the rabble.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me. Should I collect him now?”

“At this point, keep going,” said Johnny, sighing heavily. “Nothing to be done about it. Just keep me informed.”

Jensen cut to the right, hoping to catch the incoming pair of hostiles unawares. A noise from down the hall pinpointed their position, giving Jensen a good idea of where to lay in wait in. The room he chose was a half-kitchen, with some cupboards, a sink and a couple of vending machines, plus a low wall that hid the recycling bins and garbage cans. Jensen crouched behind the counter and waited for the pair to enter. If he was lucky, he could take out both at once.

The door opened, and the hostiles entered. A woman appeared first, holding a gun on the room as her partner swept in. Their comm channel clicked on, filling the air with noise.

“Ben, Sarah, report.” The voice of their squad leader came over the line, still no-nonsense and professional.

“Nothing up here, George, and no sign of a break-in.” Sarah turned to her partner and shrugged. “We’ll keep going, but I can’t say I’m feeling great about our intel.”

“We found a really good picture of a dog,” said Ben, glancing at the windows for signs of entry as Jensen moved into position behind them. “I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

“I stand corrected. I also have an idiot partner.”

“Cut it out you two,” said George. Sarah sighed loudly and swept her gaze away from the window. “Ben, I expect this kind of bullshit from, but Sarah? Keep it together. Let me know if you find anything.”

“I can’t believe you.” Sarah glared at Ben, turning her back to where Jensen crouched. “Why are you like this?”

“You just need to chill out, Sarah. You’re way too uptight.”

Jensen took their bickering as his cue and overtook the pair of gunners. He tapped Sarah’s shoulder, and in the split second she turned, he slammed their heads together. While noisier than a choke hold, it was a rapid way to take down two heavily armed guards in a closed room. Jensen lowered the two gunners to the floor and dragged them out of view of the door, then quickly disabled their weapons.

“Delta, a pair of them are down a couple rooms over, I’m heading back.” Jensen checked the hall. “Anything else I should aim for on my way?”

“Thanks for the update, kappa. We’re spread out and moving in, will have the situation contained soon. Let me know if there are any other hiccups.”

Jensen hurried along the darkened hallway, eyes and ears searching. Johnny’s comment about hiccups did not sit well, and he wanted to check on his partner--or whatever Aelif was at this point.

When he reached the office, something had changed. Leading from the desk to the air vent in the corner, there shone a faint trail of what appeared in the low light to be a mix of sand and blood. Jensen made his way to the desk to confirm what he already knew had to be true.

Aelif was gone. And all signs pointed to him hiding in the vents.

“Delta, we may have a situation.”

“What kind of situation?”

“A situation where theta is missing. It looks like he might have climbed into the vents, but how he got up there with his injuries, I couldn’t tell you.”

“God _dammit_.” Johnny exhaled loudly. “Kappa, get out of there. I need one less unknown right now. Fall back, group up with tau, and stay frosty while we get everything locked down.”

“Uh, guys?” Iris’s voice broke in over the comms. “There’s a light moving on the second floor. Who’s up there? Tell me that’s you, epsilon.”

“Wish I could, tau,” said Boris, voice tight. He sounded like he was running. “I’m on my way. Delta, we need everyone in here. This is going straight to hell.”

“Fuck. Fuck!” Johnny’s outburst wasn’t doing much for the feeling in Jensen’s stomach. “Ok, belay that last order. Kappa, where did you last see theta?”

“West side, in the middle. Two doors down from the conference room.”

“Ok everyone. We are avoiding another Keyport here. Take anyone you see out, quick and quiet. We cannot afford spillover. Call tau or me to your position if you find theta. What can you tell me on ears?”

“I’ve got them locked down to local only. Patching us in on their chatter now.” Iris sounded slightly out of breath. “Their signal’s real clown shoes, so keep quiet. We shouldn’t bleed into it, but I don’t have much to work with here.”

An angry hiss of static entered the line, and Jensen winced. The low level chatter of another group filtered in through his Infolink. Jensen recognized the voice of George, the leader, even though his tone was more stressed than before.

“Jacob, repeat that?”

“I said I think someone’s in the vents. I heard some scratching that sounded too heavy to be rats.”

“Where was the last place you heard it?” 

“Near the stairwells, I think. But that means they could be anywhere.”

“Ben, Sarah. Have you heard anything?” The line was silent for a moment, and Jensen swore internally. “Ben? Sarah? Report. Has anyone seen Sarah or Ben?”

“Cam and I last saw them going upstairs, west side.” Gene’s young voice was hesitant, but still reporting in. “I’m on the ground floor on the west side. Haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Came a new voice, presumably Cam. “I’m in the basement now, things are quiet here.”

“Tyler? Harry? Drew? Report in. I need status, right now!” 

“East side, ground floor. Clear here.” The new voice was taciturn and deep. Also, he seemed to be just below Jensen's current position. 

“Copy Tyler. Harry, Drew, where are you?”

When no more voices came over the comms, the status of the hostiles became evident. There were four still up, spread all over the building. Time to lower that number. Jensen started downstairs.

“Tyler, Gene, Jacob, something weird is going on.” George’s leaderly cool had cracked, and it seemed like it was spreading. “Jacob, go back Cam up in the basement. Gene, Tyler, meet up on the north side, then check in. I’ll go check on our missing voices. Keep channels _clear_ and report _everything_.” 

A chorus of shaky assents followed, and Jensen made the call to take out Gene and Tyler before they caused any trouble. Since Jacob and George were both unknowns, anyone who gave their location was a more viable target. Jensen knew something from his vast experience crawling around in ventilation: trying to pinpoint a person from the vague general noises in the walls was nearly impossible. If they were going to find Aelif in the vents before the hostiles, they would need a lot of luck. 

The best way to improve that luck was to eliminate all the gun-toting factors. 

Jensen quickly took out Tyler, who was not very good at checking doorways. Jensen waited until he walked by, and with one move pulled him into an office and eased him down in a choke hold. 

Silence was a high priority, so as Jensen tucked Tyler away, he tied the hostile’s hands behind his back and nuked his comms with a quick hack. But speed was vital too, so he wasn’t _too_ gentle as he shoved Tyler into a closet. 

Jensen hustled down the corridor, but as he turned the corner, he was surprised to find it empty. The building wasn’t that big, so unless Gene had run into something, he should have made it to the rendezvous point by now.

As if summoned by the errant thought, Jensen spotted the silhouette of another gunner entering an office down the hall. Sticking to the shadows, Jensen moved quickly. He closed on the office, listening at the frame. He frowned as he heard a muffled bump, barely audible from the open doorway. After a second thump, he leaned in to find the shadow of Boris, tucked behind a freestanding bookshelf, securing a hostile in the corner.

Boris glanced over his shoulder and nodded, acknowledging Jensen but finishing his work. Boris had secured Gene’s arms behind his back and taped the hostile’s mouth shut in much the same manner as Jensen had just minutes before.

“You get the one coming from the other side?” Jensen nodded and Boris straightened up, tucking zip ties and tape into his utility pockets. “Glad I got to him before he radioed in. We’re on borrowed time here. You want to head up or down?”

“Two went down.” Jensen hooked his thumb towards the stairs. “Probably best to take them out.”

“I’ll back you up.” Boris pulled an assault rifle off his back and checked the side before bracing it against his shoulder. Jensen eyed it with skepticism. 

“I’m not sure this is a guns blazing situation.” Jensen nodded towards the bound hostile on the floor. “I know we only have a couple unaccounted for, but I'd rather avoid bloodshed.”

The merc laughed, patting the side of his gun with a fond smile. “Don’t worry, Jensen. I may not be a sneaky-sneak, but I’ve been schooled enough by my acerbic friend to know the score. The rifle's noise suppressed, equipped with gel rounds, and this puppy up here is a taser. Not silent, not painless, but we’ll be taking them down, not out.”

Jensen snorted, and turned to reassess the hallway before heading out. After a quick moment of reconnaissance, they moved across the hall and descended all the way into the basement.

As they approached the threshold to the basement, Jensen’s infolink crackled with the telltale feedback of the hostile’s comms, and Jacob’s voice burst into his ear.

“George! None of the lights are working down here. There’s a lot of blood in the area, and I think I just found Cam unconscious.”

Jensen gestured to Boris to hurry down the steps. As they hit the concrete floor, Jensen locked in on the sounds of Jacob’s breathing, and led the way forward in the darkness.

“What do you mean ‘you think’?” George's voice echoed Jensen's confusion at the update. Jacob’s light gave the doorframe an amber glow, outlining it in the darkness. Jensen moved up to the door and paused, waiting for Jacob to talk again before gesturing to Boris to take any available shot. Boris nodded, and Jensen moved in behind the gunner.

“I haven’t gotten close enough to check on him yet. Somethings not right about the whole situation.” As Jensen moved in behind him, he spared a glance at Cam in the center of the flashlight’s beam. “You said to report everything. This is weird.”

A heavy sigh came over the comms. “You are technically correct. Let me know what you find. What's everyone else seeing?”

In the increasingly pregnant silence that followed, Jacob visibly steeled himself and walked forward. As he closed in on Cam, Jensen came up behind the gunman and got ready in case something went wrong.

“Ok, Jacob,” the gunman muttered to himself. “You can do this. Cam probably just got freaked out in the dark, and isn’t de-”

Jacob spasmed as taser leads connected to his neck, shocking him and making him fall backwards. His jaw seized up, and he dropped his weapon, letting it clatter to the floor. With a pop, the electricity shut off, and he fell backwards into Jensen’s waiting arms, fully unconscious. Jensen scanned Jacob’s comms, finding them completely fried. 

“Tyler, Gene, I need a report.” George sounded downright frantic as the silence of the enemy comms grew deafening. “Dammit! Jacob, what’s your status? Jacob? Cam? Anyone?”

“His night is only going to get worse.” Boris produced zip ties and handed them to Jensen as he kicked the gun away and slid his rifle to rest on his back. “I’m going to check on this guy in the corner.”

“Should we update Johnny that we’ve locked everyone else down?”

“Once we know more about this poor assho--oh fuck.” Boris pushed the body over and blanched. “Well, he’s still breathing. That eye’s not going to make it, though.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Jensen moved over to look at Cam, and he had to agree. That eye was not going to make it. 

Cam was breathing, shallowly and with a wet gurgle. The gunman’s face was slashed with jagged cuts, one slicing directly across his right eye. A jet black knife was lodged in his chest, stabbed downward between the body armor. The knife had glanced off a buckle and lodged in muscle rather than a lung, which was probably the only reason Cam was still breathing. 

Boris grabbed a penlight off his belt and swept the scene, trying to take in the rest of the action. There was more blood around the vent, but no Aelif.

“Delta, we’ve got lockdown on everyone except the squad leader, but we have some theta-related spillover. I’m stabilizing the fallen jockey, but theta spooked.”

“Copy, sigma.” Johnny sounded distracted, his voice echoing.

“What the fuck was that?” George’s voice came over the comms, furious as the reality of his situation became evident. “Holy shit, you mother fuckers. Fuck this.”

A burst of electrified static wailed through the comms as, presumably, George took the nuclear option and shut them down rather than be spied on. Boris winced at the wailing, and shook his head to clear it.

“God dammit.” Boris tilted his head toward the stairs. “Looks like Iris couldn’t stop the comms bleed. Get up there and take that guy out before he does something stupid.”

Jensen was off before Boris could finish his sentence. He knew where he had stowed Ben and Sarah, so that was where he headed. He could only hope he could get there without any other complications.

He was on the second floor when he heard a familiar voice echo from an office about halfway down the hall.

“End of the line, mage.” George's voice dripped with righteous fury. “I can see you in there. If you make me drag you out, well, the boss only said alive. Didn’t say happy about being that way.”

Fuck.

Jensen spotted the open door and accessed his infolink as he closed the gap.

“Hostiles have found theta. Second floor, west side. I’m closing in.”

“Copy, kappa.” Johnny sounded out of breath. “Everyone circle up.”

As Jensen hit the doorway, he peeked around to see George pointing a gun behind a large file cabinet. Jensen couldn’t see Aelif, but he didn’t want to risk spooking the gunman and getting the mage shot. He stayed low, waiting for his moment and watching the situation unfold.

“Last chance for easy, mage. Come out, now!” The leader barked his words as Jensen leaned forward. He couldn’t see the gunner’s expression, thanks to a dark pair of tactical goggles, but there was a significant pause. “Did you hear me? Get out of there, or I will make sure you regret it.”

Whether Aelif heard him or not, the gunner was having none of it. With a fluid motion, he holstered his gun, and reached behind the metal box to pull Aelif out. True to his words, he didn't make it easy, grabbing a handful of hair and yanking Aelif across the floor. 

Aelif made a pained sound high in his throat as he hit the wall, his body going limp.

“Shut up.” George swung his boot back into Aelif’s ribs, and Jensen heard a crack. “I don’t know if you’re why I can’t radio base, but we’d all be better off without you fucking spooks. Doesn’t matter anyway. We have a pickup coming in twenty minutes whether we call in or not, and they’re experts at unwilling person transport. Especially for people like you. We are going to lay low, and you are going to lay there until I figure out my next move, or I swear to God I will break your arms.”

George looked up and out the cracked open window, and Jensen tensed, sensing his opening to rush the room. As he rose to his feet, it became clear he wasn’t the only person waiting for that opening.

Many things happened at the same time. With George turned away, Aelif pulled a matte black knife from some place near his ribs and clenched it in his fist. A set of flashbangs flew through the window, shattering it and landing in the far corner, filling the room with light and sound. George stumbled backward into Aelif, throwing his hands up to protect his face from explosion and chaos. While he was distracted and off balance, Aelif stabbed him in the leg.

George fell screaming, and Aelif pulled his knife out. He then pushed himself up on his elbows, crawled forward, and took another stab at George. He embedded his knife in the gunner’s neck, viciously connecting at a seam between the man’s helmet and vest, sinking the blade through flesh and tendons. Blood sprayed as Jensen closed in, the whole scene quickly becoming a nightmare.

Jensen grabbed Aelif around the ribs, pulling him off the thrashing body as the blood continued to fly. The knife clattered to the ground, but Aelif fought against Jensen's hold. His face was covered in blood, his eyes closed and unseeing.

“What are you _doing?_?” Johnny stood panting in the doorway, one hand planted on the doorframe, his brow furrowed in worry. 

“Trying to stop him from savaging this guy?”

“Put him on the desk.” Brynn holstered a stun gun as she stepped through the window, closely followed by Iris. She glared down at the bleeding man on the floor like he was a disappointing child. “I knew I should have taken the shot. Clear the space and let us work!”

“Please, let us handle this,” said Iris, her hands hovering above some bags at her hips. “He won’t thank you for whatever you think ‘help’ is right now. Go with Johnny.”

Jensen lifted Aelif onto the desk, covered in blood and panting. Aelif wore a half-vacant expression, eyes unfocused and wild. Iris made a beeline for the mage, not deterred for a moment by the blood. Brynn descended on the gunner to stop both the bleeding and the screaming, though it was unclear if she was patching him up or finishing him off. As Jensen followed Johnny into the hall, he heard Iris speak.

“Hey, Aelif, hey.” She kept her voice soft and quiet, like she was talking to a wild animal. “Hey, it’s me, Iris. Can you look at me?”

Her voice faded as Jensen walked farther down the hall with Johnny. Boris, carrying Sarah, tilted his head at Johnny as he passed. Johnny shook his head in response, and Boris nodded, taking his cargo downstairs.

“What happened in there?” Jensen's exhaustion took some of the bite out of his frustration. “I’m not expecting answers to everything, but how are all of you so calm about your friend acting _possessed_?”

“Heh.” Johnny’s lips spread in an approximation of a smile, a thin veneer of amusement. “I’m glad we seem calm. I’ll let Iris know. She’ll think that’s a fucking _riot_.”

“I didn’t mean to imply-”

“I’m glad you didn’t mean to _imply_ anything. Maybe things are different when you have the backing of one of the largest corporations in North America, but all we have is each other. If one of us is in trouble, it’s our only priority.”

“That’s all well and good,” said Jensen, getting defensive at Johnny’s implications. “But that priority is fucked if we don’t get out of here before the reinforcements get here. We have less than fifteen minutes. Otherwise we are going to find out what ‘experts in unwilling transport for spooks’ means.” 

If Johnny was going to say something else, he was interrupted by the clatter of glass shattering in the office they had just left. Johnny and Jensen exchanged a glance and hurried back. 

A paperweight lay shattered on the ground, having been flung off the desk at high speed. It had missed Brynn and her patient, but the floor now glimmered like stars in the night. Aelif sat with his legs curled up to his chest, eyes wide open, clearly seeing the room for the first time. 

“Iris?” Aelif stared down at his hands and stretched his limbs out, wincing as he found parts that didn’t want to stretch very far. He blinked rapidly, taking in the room, the body, the blood. “Where are we?” 

Slow down. Breathe. Look at me,” said Iris, voice stern but kind. Aelif turned his head towards her and uncurled his spine with some effort. “You’re ok, everyone’s ok. Don’t panic. We still have to get back to base, and we can put together the rest of the night. Can you walk?” 

Yeah, I’ll manage.” His voice wavered. He pushed himself to the edge of the desk and stared at the ground a moment, taking in the state of his leg. “Actually, no. This wound is too deep. It’s not going to take weight.” 

It’s ok, we’ve got you,” Iris gestured to Brynn, whose hands were hovering over the man on the ground as she closed his neck hole. “She’ll be done there in a moment. Then we’ll get you up and walking, and we all can leave.” 

Iris looked up and glared at the two men in the doorway, tilting her head away pointedly over Aelif’s shoulder, motioning for them to get out of there. 

Johnny pulled at Jensen’s arm, heading towards the stairs. Jensen followed Johnny, who was furiously typing on a datapad before in stuffing his pocket. The detective glared up at the aug, as if trying to figure out how to put something into words. Jensen wisely waited until Johnny was ready to talk again. 

It didn’t take long. Johnny sighed, taking off his hat and rubbing his scalp. 

“Look, Jensen-“ Johnny began, then stopped, as if he wasn’t sure exactly how much to say. With a huff, he put his hat back on. “We’re still under the clock here, so I'll keep this short. It’s my job to keep an eye on my team’s limits, but sometimes something unexpected happens. Go help Boris, tell him about the reinforcements, and get to the car. I’m going to help Iris and Brynn wrap up. We can debrief later.” 

Johnny turned back to the office, leaving Jensen halfway to the stairs. Jensen hurried to the front of the building, finding Boris positioning Sara next to Ben and Tyler. 

“There’s another wave coming soon. How can I help?” 

Boris cocked his head at Jensen approaching. “Where's the last one?” asked Boris, as he started to secure the arms of the hostiles to the receptionist's desk. “Did you stash him in an air vent someplace?” 

“Brynn is patching him up.” Jensen jerked a thumb toward the stairs. “Aelif got to him first. There's a clean up crew coming, so we should wrap up.” 

“Ah.” Boris finished his fastening and straightened up. “Just need to bring over the last two from the east side. Wanna give me a hand?” 

“Sure.” They carried their burdens together in an expectant silence for a couple dozen feet before Jensen had to ask. “This kind of thing happen often? Everything ending in a fountain of blood?” 

Boris let out a little laugh and shrugged. 

“Often as it needs to, I guess. This business ain’t tidy. If people have to die, they die. We don’t take hit jobs anymore, but only 'cause they’re always more trouble than they’re worth. It’s not ‘cause we were bad at it, or had a problem with it, really. Especially not if someone’s trying to kill you first. At our scale people are always trying to fuck you about it, no matter how much the initial job pays.” 

Jensen didn’t really have a response to that, but something on his face must have answered for him. Boris sighed and pushed through the door. The last two gunners were tucked under a desk, so Boris shoved it out of the way. 

“Look, we don’t go out of our way to murder guys, but we’re not losing sleep. We all care more about getting out clean and doing the job right. Give me a hand loading these guys into the lobby, so we can lock them all up in the same place, ok?” 

Jensen picked up one of the gunners, and turned to Boris with a bland expression. Boris smiled and clapped him on the arm. There wasn’t much to say, but Jensen had plenty to think about. 

As they hurried back in the lobby with their unconscious cargo, they found Johnny standing with the leader--bloody but breathing--at his feet. He shrugged a heavy bag, with a conspicuous panel with wires and a keypad on the side, off of his shoulder and let it thunk to the floor. 

“If you’re both good, we’re finished upstairs. The girls got Aelif to the car. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get out of here.” 

“How is it?” Boris’s question was light, but concern undercut his tone. Johnny’s eyes flickered over to Jensen before he answered. 

“It’s not good, but it’s no Keyport. We’ll figure out more once we're out of here. If you guys take this to the security room, it’ll take care of the cameras and we can leave.” 

Without waiting for a response, Johnny stormed to the exit, his heavy tan trenchcoat hiked up to his ears. Boris lifted the bag and gestured for Jensen to join him. 

“Security room's back here, but it was all locked up.” Boris shot Jensen a wolfish grin. “One of us ought to be able to get through a locked door somehow.” 

“I think we’ll manage.” Jensen looked back at Johnny’s retreating form as he followed Boris, those final comments simmering in his mind. As they hurried through the silent hallway, all the unknowns kept dogging at him. By the time they reached the security door, he had narrowed them down to one question. “Ok, I have to ask. What happened with Keyport?” 

“Yeah, I thought you might ask about that.” Boris checked the handle of the door, then gestured to the keypad beside it, letting Jensen take a shot at hacking into it before kicking the door in. Jensen knelt down and got started, and Boris continued. “Keyport was a bad situation. We had shitty intel, worse luck, and in the end, we barely got paid. There were a lot of deaths in Keyport, but we managed to keep civilians out of it. We lost three of our own, and we were damn lucky it wasn’t more.” 

The door clicked open, and Boris smiled a big proud smile. He clapped Jensen hard on the back and shrugged the bag off his shoulder. Pushing the door open farther, he dropped the bag in with a thunk. He leaned over to push type a code in the keypad on the side of the bag while he continued. 

“Long story, but we were up against religious zealots. We’d been trading blows for weeks, but they nabbed two of ours. We found the warehouse they were being kept in, but it was a trap. One of our guys was dead, the other dying, and the ceiling caved in. Then the assholes in power armor showed up. 

“We threw everything at them. Our medic died. Aelif and Iris were the last two up, and Iris was trying to hack through some nasty pieces of virus to get us some kind of edge. I think Johnny was awake, but he’d broken a leg and an arm. Everyone else was down. 

“It wasn’t pretty, but the kid cut us out. And he did it while sporting a gut wound he stitched up himself. We all came out of Keyport with scars. Johnny got rattled by what he saw there, and it makes him cautious. Especially where the kid and Iris are concerned.” 

“Don't you worry?” 

“Naw. Iris might seem disconnected sometimes, but she is a rock. And Aelif's prickly as hell, but if he's in your corner he’s there until the absolute end.” Boris stood up and wiped his knees. “This is primed to go off in ten minutes and fry the systems. Usually Iris does this at a distance, but we have back up plans for nights like tonight. Shall we?” 

Jensen nodded, and they made their way outside. Boris led Jensen to a cargo van, with Johnny in the front seat. Johnny tipped his hat to them as they approached, a tired smile on his face. As Jensen opened the side door, he found Brynn in the center bench, her head propped on her arm. Iris sat in the way back, looking down at the bench where Aelif was lying, facing the back of the van. 

“EMP's all set. Let’s go.” Boris opened the passenger side door and hopped in, the butt of his large gun clattering against the dashboard. “I’m sure we’d all like to get some sleep.” 

Jensen grunted and slid in next to Brynn, taking another glance toward the backseat. Someone had rustled up a blanket, so all Jensen could see in the dim light was a mess of blood-soaked silver hair and a dirt-covered blanket. But Aelif appeared to be breathing, which had to be a good sign. 

As they drove off into the night, that seemed like enough. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man! This was a hard chapter to get through! The action was complicated, I had to figure out injury mechanics, I think I balanced drama and melodrama correctly, but I guess that's up to you to decide, isn't it? Hope y'all liked it! As always, my beta is a rock-star, and I think she's the bees-knees, and has gotten all the prime all caps yelling about my feelings on these chapters. 
> 
> Next time: late night debriefing, poor emotional processing, the night finally ending.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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